Points of Passage: Jewish Migrants from Eastern Europe in Scandinavia, Germany, and Britain 1880-1914 9781782380306

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POINTS OF PASSAGE

POINTS OF PASSAGE Jewish Transmigrants from Eastern Europe in Scandinavia, Germany, and Britain 1880–1914

Edited by

Tobias Brinkmann

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2013 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2013 Tobias Brinkmann

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without wri en permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Points of passage : Jewish transmigrants from Eastern Europe in Scandinavia, Germany, and Britain 1880-1914 / edited by Tobias Brinkmann. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-78238-029-0 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-78238-030-6 (institutional ebook) 1. Jews—Europe, Eastern—Migrations. 2. Jews—Europe—Social conditions—19th century. 3. Jews—Europe—History—19th century. 4. Scandinavia—Emigration and immigration. 5. Germany—Emigration and immigration. 6. England—Emigration and immigration. 7. Europe—Ethnic relations. I. Brinkmann, Tobias, editor. JV7597.P65 2013 305.892'40409034—dc23 2013005573

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN 978-1-78238-029-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-78238-030-6 (institutional ebook)

@ Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction Points of Passage: Reexamining Jewish Migrations from Eastern Europe a er 1880 Tobias Brinkmann

1

PART I. MEDICALIZATION OF BORDERS Chapter 1

Germs of Anarchy, Crime, Disease, and Degeneracy: Jewish Migration to the United States and the Medicalization of European Borders around 1900 27 Barbara Lüthi

PART II. TRANSIT THROUGH SCANDINAVIA, GERMANY, AND BRITAIN Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Immigrants or Transmigrants? Eastern European Jews in Sweden, 1860–1914 Carl Henrik Carlsson

47

Emigrant Trains: Jewish Migration through Prussia and American Remote Control, 1880–1914 Nicole Kvale Eilers

63

Transmigrants between Legal Restrictions and Private Charity: The Jews’ Temporary Shelter in London, 1885–1939 Klaus Weber

85

PART III. ATLANTIC PASSAGES Chapter 5

The Improvement of Travel Conditions for Migrants Crossing the North Atlantic, 1900–1914 Drew Keeling

107

vi • Contents

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Russian-Jewish Transmigration and Scandinavian Shipping Companies: The Case of DFDS and the Atlantic Rate War of 1904–1905 Per Kristian Sebak The Boys and Girls Not from Brazil: From Russia to Rio and Back Again Via Southampton and Hamburg, 1878–1880 Tony Kushner

130

148

Notes on Contributors

163

Selected Bibliography

165

Index

171

@ Illustrations Figures 5.1. Increasing Fuel Efficiency, Increasing Space per Passenger, No Lasting Trend in Fares, 1901–1913

109

5.2. Estimated Percentage of Second-Class and Steerage Berths that Were Closed Berths, 1899–1914

129

6.1. Total Number of Passengers on DFDS, Copenhagen– New York, March 1904 to March 1905

142

6.2. Passengers per Departure on DFDS, Copenhagen– New York, March 1904 to March 1905

143

Tables 2.1. Number of Jews Living in Sweden, 1850–1920

49

2.2. Percent Increase of Jews Living in Sweden, 1851–1920

51

2.3. Jews Living in Sweden Compared to New York, 1870–1920

51

2.4. Birth Countries of Adult Jews (Born before 1865) Officially Living in Sweden, 31 December 1880

52

2.5. Birth Gubernias of All Jews Born before 1865 in the Russian Empire and Officially Living in Sweden, 31 December 1880

53

2.6. The Fate of Eastern European Jews in Sweden between 1881 and 1890, Excluding Estimated Distribution of the Nonresponse Group

56

2.7. Eastern European Jews Officially Living in Sweden in 1880 Who Emigrated to the United States, 1876–1890

57

viii • Illustrations

2.8. Jews Domiciled in Russia and Poland Who Emigrated through Gothenburg and Other Swedish ports, 1869–1914

59

5.1. Second-Class and Steerage Traffic between Europe and New York, Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, 1899–1914

107

5.2. Estimated Revenues by Class, 1900–1913, European Port Region 5.3. Shipping Vessels between Europe and Major U.S. Ports, 1900–1914, with Percentages of Steerage Capacity in Closed Berths

115

125

@ Acknowledgments This volume depends on the support and advice of several scholars. I am particularly grateful to Stefanie Schüler-Springorum. I also received valuable feedback from Gur Alroey, Rita Bredefeldt, Nelly Elias, Nicholas J. Evans, Andreas Fahrmeir, Christhard Hoffmann, Ruth Leiserowitz, Eric Lohr, Leo Lucassen, Jochen Oltmer, and Joachim Schloer. At an early stage, Helmut Müssener at the University of Uppsala helped me to get in touch with scholars working on Jewish history in Scandinavia. Marion Berghahn showed interest in this collection early on. I want to thank her and her colleagues, notably Ann Przyzycki DeVita, Lauren Weiss, Elizabeth Berg, Alison Hope, and Adam Capitanio, at the New York office of Berghahn Books, for producing this volume. The anonymous readers made valuable and constructive suggestions on how to improve the essays. At Penn State, Michele Barosh helped me during the final editing stage. And last but not least, I want to express my gratitude to the contributing authors for their cooperation and patience. I received support from the Institute for the History of Jews in Germany in Hamburg, from the history department, the Parkes Institute for Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, and the School of Humanities at the University of Southampton, where I taught until 2008; and from the Jewish studies program and the history department at Penn State. I want to thank especially Malvin and Lea Bank for their generous support of Jewish studies at Penn State and for their interest in the history of Jewish migrations.

@

Introduction

POINTS OF PASSAGE Reexamining Jewish Migrations from Eastern Europe a er 1880 Tobias Brinkmann

Few topics in modern Jewish history have been as exhaustively researched as the Jewish mass migration from the Russian and AustroHungarian Empires between the early 1880s and mid 1920s. It is indeed difficult to overlook the studies examining the arrival, community building, and assimilation of Jewish immigrants, especially in the American urban context. The eastern European mass migration transformed Jewish life around the globe. In Britain, Palestine, South Africa, Argentina, Australia, and many other places Jewish immigrants established new communities or outnumbered older Jewish se lers, o en within a few years.1 Jews also moved within eastern Europe in large numbers after 1880. They le rural shtetlach (small towns) for industrializing cities, such as Łódź and Warsaw and the imperial capitals Budapest and Vienna. Indeed, in and beyond eastern Europe, the Jewish mass migration was primarily a movement to industrializing cities. Recent research indicates that internal migrations, emigration, and remigration were closely intertwined. Frequently, Jews did not move straight from the shtetl (small town) to an overseas destination but via industrializing cities in Europe where they acquired skills and (some) capital before moving across the Atlantic to another city—and then sometimes back home.2 A closer look at the Jewish mass migration between the 1880s and 1920s reveals a number of surprising research gaps. Li le is known about the exact causes of the migration, the social history of shetlach experiencing out-migration, and the paths Jewish migrants chose. It is also unclear why and for how long Jews (and other eastern Europeans) stopped over in transit countries including imperial Germany and Britain, and how they reached their respective destinations. Of course, Ellis Island, literally a point of passage into America, situated spectacularly in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty and opposite the skyline of Manhat-

2 • Tobias Brinkmann

tan, has a much higher symbolic significance than the o en inconspicuous departure stations, primitive makeshi facilities for migrant masses at European railway stations, port cities and former control posts along borders that were redrawn several times during the twentieth century. Today, Ellis Island is remembered as America’s iconic gateway. Yet at its dedication in January 1892, the reception center’s main function was to closely screen all arrivals to make sure they did not constitute a threat to American society. The average rejection rate of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island between 1892 and 1914 was low. Only about 2 percent of migrants were rejected as “undesirables.”3 Yet a much higher proportion of migrants en route to the United States between 1892 and 1914, among them many Jews, never reached Ellis Island. This was, in part, due to a sophisticated control system that reached far beyond North America’s shores. Even before 1892, persons who were unlikely to be admi ed at an American port of entry frequently were denied boarding at European and Asian ports—usually by employees of steamship lines, sometimes by American consular personnel, or by state officials in the respective transit countries. The steamship lines faced penalties by the U.S. immigration commissioner if they transported too many undesirable migrants. The steamship lines and the authorities in the transit countries had to cover the costs associated with the involuntary return journey of persons who were not admi ed at Ellis Island and similar immigration stations at other American and Canadian ports.4 Migration scholar Aristide Zolberg has characterized the rationale behind the rejections of migrants en route to the United States in Europe (and Asia) as an American policy of remote control. Since European and Asian migrants could reach the Americas only by ship, the United States could shi the decision over admi ing immigrants to the port of embarkation, and thus, in the case of migrants from eastern Europe, to transit countries such as imperial Germany, Britain, even Canada, and not least, to the steamship lines. Several years before Ellis Island began screening immigrants in 1892, the U.S. authorities began sending back larger groups of undesirable European arrivals: convicts, women suspected of being prostitutes, carriers of a contagious disease, and, above all, so-called paupers—persons who would not be able to support themselves and were at risk of becoming public charges. Since more deportees were being returned to their ports of embarkation, the authorities in most transit countries were examining how to exclude problematic migrants.5 Although millions of eastern Europeans crossed through Germany, France, Britain, and Canada to the Americas, South Africa, and Australia between 1850 and the late 1920s, li le is known about their transit

Points of Passage • 3

experiences, the organization of the mass transit migration, their legal status while in transit; also, li le is known about migrants who were forced to interrupt their journey or who were returned to their country of origin. Historians, sociologists, and other scholars focus almost exclusively on arrival, se lement, and community building in certain states, such as Britain, imperial Germany, and the United States. Few authors are researching the causes for emigration from states other than their own. Transmigrants, however, transcend(ed) the still-dominant nationstate paradigm as they traverse(d) imperial and national borders. The essays in this volume shed light on select aspects of the transmigration of Jews and other eastern Europeans en route to (and from) the Americas between 1880 and 1914, and in a few cases beyond World War I. Most authors concentrate on Jews but examine their experiences against the background of the larger movement of people across central and western Europe. Several essays analyze the travel conditions, especially in regard to the sea voyage. Another focus is the rise of (im-)migration restrictions in the decades before 1914. These restrictions were closely related to the impact of mass migration in different countries around the world. Of particular concern were fears about the spread of contagious disease and encounters with large numbers of people of different racial and cultural backgrounds. The following paragraphs provide an overview of the current scholarship, fill in some of the gaps between the essays, and highlight some of the major questions discussed.

Immigration vs. Migration? The focus of the scholarship on Jewish immigration rather than its causes is not surprising. The mass migration from eastern Europe redefined the Jewish Diaspora, leading to the rise of major centers of Jewish life within a few decades. The immigrants completely transformed small and even midsized Jewish communities, in Britain, South Africa, Argentina, and especially the United States. In 1880, fewer than two hundred fi y thousand Jews lived in the United States. Largely as a result of the strong immigration from eastern Europe and natural growth, the number rose to well over three million by 1910. Scholars studying immigration and its repercussions are in a relatively advantageous position compared to historians working on the emigration and transmigration of Jews from eastern Europe. They can concentrate on a few archives in or in relative proximity to the community they are researching. In Western Europe and North America today, well-managed

4 • Tobias Brinkmann

collections can be easily accessed, especially in cities with large Jewish communities, such as New York, London, and Chicago. Scholars can obtain le ers, images, and objects preserved by immigrants, and examine the files of immigrant associations. They also have access to copious data collected by the immigration authorities in the United States and other countries about arrivals. Admi edly, in the United States Jews and other immigrants were not asked about their religion, but a er 1899 the U.S. Bureau of Immigration registered Jewish immigrants as Hebrews if they declared Yiddish to be their native language.6 In marked contrast, scholars working on the causes and background of the Jewish mass migration from eastern Europe face multiple obstacles. Sources are scarce, dispersed in different countries, and sometimes are difficult to access. Authorities in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires and in Romania did not collect systematic data about emigrants who le without notifying state officials. More important, official documents, community files, and other sources relating to Jewish communities in eastern Europe were destroyed or dispersed during and a er the Holocaust.7 Even the materials that remained were largely beyond the reach of Western researchers until the early 1990s. The opening of archives across Eastern Europe a er 1990 partly explains why the field of history of the Jews in eastern Europe before the Holocaust has flourished. Yet no author has completed a detailed analysis of the mass emigration. This lacuna reflects a lack of research into the social and economic history of smaller shtetl communities affected by migration. Limited research also explains why the exact causes of the Jewish mass migration are still being debated.8 In an influential 1975 article, Nobel Prize–winning economist Simon Kuznets, himself an immigrant from eastern Europe, challenged the then-widely accepted thesis that the Russian pogroms of 1881 and a series of anti-Jewish riots that culminated in the 1903 Kishinev pogrom were the main cause of the mass migration. Dismissing the pogroms as a major factor driving the Jewish mass emigration, Kuznets pointed to the impact of social and economic factors on the Jewish population in the Russian Empire. Thorough research conducted by the late John Klier on the 1881 pogroms supports Kuznets’s case. According to Klier, who analyzed hundreds of documents in local archives across Ukraine and Russia, the 1881 pogroms were not directly connected to the rising Jewish emigration at the same period. Indeed, as Kuznets had already suggested, instead of leaving the Ukrainian towns where most pogroms occurred in the early 1880s, Jews actually migrated to them a er the pogroms. Most of the migrants leaving the Russian Empire in this period hailed from Lithuania where anti-Jewish violence was

Points of Passage • 5

limited.9 Another significant sending region was the Austrian province of Galicia. Here Jews were fully emancipated in 1867 and not subjected to violent a acks and state discrimination as in the Russian Empire and Romania. Yet, like their Russian and Romanian coreligionists, the overwhelming majority of the Jewish (and non-Jewish) population in Galicia was poor, and Jewish migration overseas and to Vienna was strong, especially a er 1900.10 The Jewish (im-)migration from eastern Europe is usually studied in isolation, although Jews lived and traveled together with Poles, Slovaks, ethnic Germans, Lithuanians, Ruthenians, and others. Sometimes Jews and non-Jews from a certain region went to the same overseas destinations where they lived in adjacent neighborhoods and sometimes even worked in the same factories.11 Scholars focusing on single groups tend to emphasize specific causes, as many studies on the Jewish mass migration illustrate. Mark Wischnitzer’s 1948 study To Dwell in Safety, the first comprehensive survey of Jewish migration a er 1800 not limited to a specific country or region, remains unsurpassed in its scope. Yet Wischnitzer depicted Jewish migrations as isolated movements sui generis, identifying anti-Jewish persecution as the continuous overarching cause.12 In American immigration history, the ethnic paradigm continues to cast a long shadow. Historians, in particular, single out specific groups (o en their own), while social scientists are more open to comparative approaches. In a few cases, European and American historians have pooled their respective research on emigration from a specific state and the immigration of a specific ethnic group to North America. The transatlantic migration of German speakers from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries has been researched in great detail. The same applies to the Irish migration to the United States and Canada, and to a lesser extent to the migration of Scandinavians to the United States. The expanding research field on Jewish immigration in the United States, however, has not found a counterpart on the other side of the Atlantic. Most scholars in modern Jewish history venture uneasily beyond the borders of a specific nation-state and tend to ignore the fellow travelers and neighbors of Jewish migrants. Only few authors, including Nancy Green and Ewa Morawska, have studied Jewish immigration in a broader comparative framework.13 Examining Jewish migrations a er 1800 within the wider eastern European and global context highlights the impact of general economic and social factors. The migrations of Jews and others from and within eastern Europe were of course only facets of a strongly growing global movement during the second half of the nineteenth century. A rapidly

6 • Tobias Brinkmann

improving infrastructure for movement across and between continents, decreasing passage prices for transoceanic travel, and the faster and more reliable exchange of information and goods unlocked new labor markets around the world.14 Indeed, the seemingly sudden rise of the Jewish migration from eastern Europe coincided with the rise of migration from eastern and southern Europe to the Americas and western Europe. Few authors in modern Jewish history have paid a ention to the correlation between the rising migration from the Russian Empire and the expansion of the railroad network in the regions where most migrants originated. By 1880, the railroad opened the door to America even for relatively poor members of rural societies across eastern Europe. Not only could migrants travel from the shtetl to North Sea ports much more quickly, but also by the early 1880s the transatlantic passage had become much more comfortable and affordable as the large steamship lines launched giant ocean liners that could transport more passengers more quickly and more safely across the Atlantic.15

Mashke Antin’s Journey A closer study of the journeys of Jewish migrants—the topic of this volume—helps to shed light on the Jewish mass migration from eastern Europe. Retracing the paths of migrants through Germany, Scandinavia, Britain, Canada, and, in a few cases, even through East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, requires more time and travel than studying immigration. However, apart from travel accounts, le ers, and memoirs by migrants, scholars can access extensive source collections preserved by railroad companies, steamship lines, and different state agencies in the transit countries. Jewish philanthropic organizations such as the Paris-based Alliance Israèlite Universelle, Germany’s Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Commi ee, and the Jewish Colonization Association that had offices across the Russian Empire, collected, exchanged, and published extensive data on the living conditions of Jews in eastern Europe, on immigration policies around the world, and on the experiences of migrants during the journey and a er reaching their respective destinations.16 While the journey from eastern Europe across central Europe to the Americas was exciting and stressful, it was also relatively safe and swi a er 1880. Only a few years earlier, the Atlantic crossing had been a formidable challenge. Until the late 1860s, migrants had to walk long distances to reach train stations, and head from there to the port cities on the North or the Baltic Seas. They made the Atlantic crossing with

Points of Passage • 7

primitive sailing vessels. In a diary, Bernhard Felsenthal, a young Jewish teacher from a village near Kaiserslautern in the German Palatinate, described a typical crossing on a sailing ship in the summer of 1854. The journey from Le Havre to New York took more than five weeks. All passengers suffered from intense thirst and seasickness, and a severe storm caused many to fear for their lives. Felsenthal became so sick that his fellow passengers believed him dead. Some fared much worse. In the early 1850s, thousands of Irish emigrants perished during or shortly a er the Atlantic crossing. Storms claimed dozens of ramshackle ships and thousands of half-starved Irish fell victim to typhus and dysentery. In the late 1840s, at least five thousand of these migrants who had died during or shortly a er the journey were buried at Grosse Île, an island in the St. Lawrence River, which served as a quarantine station for migrants traveling to Canada and the Great Lakes region. By 1880, steamships had replaced sailing vessels, and migrants enjoyed much more comfort and safety. Fatal accidents became rare. Governments in different countries began to regulate the mass transport more strictly, imposing minimum requirements for accommodation, food provisions, and hygiene on the steamships and general safety regulations regarding the railroads. By 1900, the distance from an eastern European shtetl or city to New York could be covered in li le more than three weeks.17 If the journey became relatively unspectacular and safe a er 1880, why devote a volume of essays to a seemingly ephemeral aspect of the Jewish mass migration? The travel account of a young Jewish migrant from Russia published only a few years a er her immigration in 1899 throws an interesting light on what was seemingly a routine journey. Mashke Antin’s 1894 journey from Polotzk in northern Russia through Germany to Boston provides several clues about obstacles (trans-) migrants encountered far from America’s borders soon a er 1880. Her report is usually read as the testimony of a Jewish migrant passing from Russian oppression and German harassment to the American promised land, but her detailed descriptions, which are backed by other sources, reveal a story that transcends the history of the Jewish mass migration in a narrow sense. Mashke Antin’s journey illustrates the impact of government regulations on the movement of millions of people around the globe decades before the implementation of more extensive migration restrictions following World War I.18 Antin’s father had moved to Boston in 1893 and sent tickets to his wife and daughters in the following year—conforming to a widespread pa ern among Jewish migrants from eastern Europe. At the Russian border with Germany the small family faced the first unexpected hurdle. Officials in Prussia, Germany’s largest state, refused them entry for

8 • Tobias Brinkmann

no apparent reason, leaving the distraught mother and her daughters on the platform of the small Russian border station. “We were homeless, houseless, and friendless in a strange place,” Antin recalls. They were allowed to cross the border only a er her mother pleaded with the representative of a Jewish aid organization who intervened on their behalf behind the scenes. The aid organization very likely promised Prussian officials to cover the cost for a potential return journey, should the Antins be refused admission to the United States. In the east Prussian border town of Eydtkuhnen, the Antins boarded a train with other transmigrants, en route to Hamburg. The train passed through Berlin without a stop, only to come to a halt in a deserted area, a few miles outside the city. Germans in white overalls rushed the migrants off the train, separated men from women and children, and threw the luggage on a big pile. The completely bewildered migrants were driven into a small building and forced to undress. Antin’s recollections betray the existential angst that befell the travelers: Here we had been taken to a lonely place. … Our things were taken away, our friends separated from us; a man came to inspect us, as if to ascertain our full value; strange-looking people driving us like dumb animals, helpless and unresisting; children we could not see crying in a way that suggested terrible things; ourselves driven into a li le room.19

As it turned out, the purpose of the stop was the thorough examination and disinfection of migrants and their luggage. A er each had paid 2 marks for the procedure, they were rushed back on the train. A er arriving in Hamburg, Mashke and her fellow migrants were accommodated for several days in a quarantine facility in the port before finally being allowed to board the ship bound for Boston. In hindsight, Antin associated the German transit with hostile officials and railway staff, who treated the bewildered migrants like military conscripts. Bernhard Felsenthal, who traveled to America in the 1850s, does not mention being searched or supervised by state officials on his journey from the Palatinate via Paris, Le Havre, and New York to Louisville. Antin, on the other hand, encountered officials on almost every step of her journey from Polotzk via east Prussia, Berlin, and Hamburg to Boston. Upon arrival in Hamburg the Antins, her fellow passengers, and their belongings were thoroughly searched: “That was a nice treatment. … Always a call for money, always suspicion of our presence and always rough orders and scowls of disapproval, even at the quickest obedience.”20 Transmigrants who did not pass the repeated inspections along the transit corridor were deported back across Germany’s eastern border. Their numbers were significant. Between 1900 and 1914, German of-

Points of Passage • 9

ficials and employees of the steamship lines annually deported about ten thousand transmigrants from eastern Europe who were en route to the United States. Most never really entered Germany because they were rejected at the border. Some were desperate. In April 1905, a Jewish couple from Russia commi ed suicide in the small town of Ostrowo (Posen), on the German border with Russia, a er they were turned back. They could not prove sufficient funds, making it likely that American officials would categorize them as paupers and return them to Europe. The decision to deport them back across the border was not made by German state officials but by employees of a large German steamship line. Transmigrants could do li le to challenge such a verdict.21

Regulating Mass Migration Intercontinental migration is not a recent phenomenon, but the movement of large numbers of people across and between continents in a ma er of months, even weeks, during the second half of the nineteenth century was unprecedented and triggered debates about restrictions in the main receiving countries. The three decades a er 1880 witnessed the implementation of immigration restrictions in the United States, Germany, Britain, Australia, and several other nation-states. Not all of these measures aimed at excluding immigrants, but rather at regulating the unprecedented mass movement, even though certain laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1882, or the Prussian mass deportations of foreign Poles and Jews between 1885 and 1888, betray an openly xenophobic agenda. Apart from excluding certain groups, governments strove to regulate the mass movement by establishing and standardizing access and transit procedures. In the receiving societies, however, the restrictions and controls were also driven by a conflict between “strange bedfellows.”22 Employers and the owners of large agricultural estates, looking for cheap labor, opposed restrictions, as did immigrants waiting for relatives to join them and depending on relatively open labor markets. In contrast, union leaders protested against the undercu ing of wages by immigrants. They uneasily shared a platform with groups and parties who addressed widespread fears of the immigration of large numbers of racial and cultural strangers. The restrictions imposed between the 1880s and 1914 constituted a compromise between these conflicting demands. The debate about the benefits and costs associated with mass immigration explains why a er 1880 state officials confronted immigrants and transmigrants such as Mashke Antin with growing distrust.23

10 • Tobias Brinkmann

As the migration within and emigration from Europe increased, the authorities in the main transit and receiving countries were confronted with rising numbers of individuals who could not financially support themselves. Some had been cheated during the journey or had underestimated the cost for food and steamship tickets, others departed with the hope of receiving some support along the way. Not surprisingly, officials in the immigration and transit countries regarded indigent migrants or “paupers” as a nuisance. In addition to funding the return journeys of persons returned by U.S. immigration inspectors to European ports and poor return migrants, European transit countries had to fund the return journeys of indigent migrants stranded while in transit to the North Sea ports. In his essay, Tony Kushner depicts the travails of a group of German-speaking Russians who returned on their own accord from Brazil in 1879 but were stranded in the British port city of Southampton because they lacked the funds to travel back to Russia on their own. Kushner’s essay highlights the lack of communication between various governments, and the u er confusion and despair of migrants caught in the middle. To avoid funding and organizing the return of indigent transmigrants and of persons returned by the American (and sometimes) British authorities, German state officials began to examine transmigrants from eastern Europe much more closely a er 1885. The Prussian government, already concerned about an invasion of eastern Europeans, opted for heavy-handed measures against unwanted foreigners. Between 1885 and 1888, Prussia deported at least thirty thousand foreign Jews and Poles from its territory. In later years, larger groups of illegal immigrants were repeatedly expelled. At the same time, hundreds of transmigrants were deported in the vicinity of the border, or, like Mashke Antin and her family, were refused access. Prussian border officials rejected the Antins because they did not carry enough cash to fund a possible return journey to Russia from the United States. Others were detained during the journey to the North Sea port cities and taken back to the border, but the long border separating Germany from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires was impossible to seal and many migrants slipped through the net. The facility near Berlin where Mashke Antin and her fellow travelers were screened in 1894 was initially established to remove transmigrants from Berlin’s train stations, supervise them more closely, and identify paupers. The Auswandererbahnhof (emigrant train station) in Ruhleben went into operation in November 1891, only weeks before Ellis Island was dedicated in January 1892. Foreigners who had crossed into Germany undetected and who had traveled via Berlin by train could not avoid an inspection

Points of Passage • 11

in Ruhleben, if they were checked by the police. Persons who did not meet American access criteria were turned back at the border. At some port cities in Europe and Asia, American consular and medical officials examined the migrants, but they could hardly cope with the large number of passengers boarding the ships.24 The disinfection procedures described by Antin were introduced only in the spring of 1893. In the previous summer, a severe cholera epidemic had claimed thousands of lives in Hamburg, a major port of embarkation for eastern European migrants. Governments across Europe and in North America were alarmed, not least because central Russia also was affected by cholera. In the fall of 1892, as the Hamburg authorities were struggling to bring the outbreak under control, the United States almost completely interrupted transatlantic passenger traffic for several months. The embargo was li ed in early 1893 a er the disease was finally contained. Even though a clear link between the outbreaks in Russia and Hamburg was not established, in 1893 the United States required all migrants from Russia to remain in quarantine for several days in the port of embarkation. Ruhleben was equipped with disinfection facilities sometime in 1893. Mashke Antin’s description of Ruhleben in the spring of 1894 is one of the earliest accounts of the new procedures imposed on transmigrants. In her essay in this volume, Barbara Lüthi takes a closer look at the wider context of what she defines as the “medicalization of borders.” The screening procedures, she argues, betray not just a fear of the spreading of disease, but also the impact of eugenics and racialized definitions of strangers who were widely perceived as a potential threat for the receiving societies.25

Nongovernmental Actors and the Mass Migration While immigration historians have examined the origins of restrictive laws such as the British 1905 Aliens Act in great detail, nongovernmental actors, especially the steamship lines, migrant aid organizations, and the media have been overlooked.26 The Jewish case is of particular interest, because decades before 1900, Jewish aid associations networked across borders, establishing a presence along the main transit routes across and beyond Europe. Already in the late 1860s the Alliance Israèlite Universelle and Jewish community leaders across central Europe, Britain, and the United States began to coordinate support for Jewish migrants from eastern Europe. They publicized fundraising calls, collected donations from Jewish communities across Europe and allocated funds to Jewish communities near major border crossings and

12 • Tobias Brinkmann

along transit routes. Established Jews in the West felt an obligation to support Jews in need, but in order to refute accusations by anti-Semites they also wanted to make sure that no Jewish migrant would become a public charge. As increasing numbers of Jewish migrants crossed the Russian border seeking support from the Jewish communities in border towns in Austrian Galicia and east Prussia, the transnational Jewish support network struggled to raise the necessary funds and to accommodate migrants. The founding of the Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden in Berlin in 1901 represents a shi to a more sustained strategy. The Hilfsverein worked closely with permanent local Jewish aid committees that had formed in the 1890s along the major points of passage in central Europe, from the border crossings to major train stations and the port cities. In 1904, the Hilfsverein created a permanent clearinghouse in Berlin, the Central Office for Jewish Emigration Affairs. The Hilfsverein Central Office exchanged information with Jewish organizations in the destination countries and in eastern Europe, convened regular meetings of European and American Jewish aid officials, and coordinated the allocation of support. The Hilfsverein published a newsle er with detailed information about ticket prices and immigration policies that was distributed among Jewish communities in eastern Europe. Members of the Hilfsverein also lobbied with high-ranking government officials in the United States and Argentina, but also in Russia, and publicized cases of abuse.27 In his essay, Klaus Weber discusses the emergence of an organized Jewish support network for Jewish transmigrants in London. He shows how the Jews’ Temporary Shelter (JTS) in the East End coordinated its support activities with other local support institutions—and with the Hilfsverein and other Jewish aid commi ees across Europe and North America. The British capital was a major destination and a point of passage. The same applies to a number of cities across Europe. In recent years, the history of Jewish migration to and through Berlin has received increasing a ention. The focus is on the interwar period, when the German capital served as an important transit point for Jewish migrants and refugees from eastern Europe. Li le is known about Jewish and other transmigrants in cities along major migration routes such as Odessa, Vienna, Warsaw, Leipzig, and New York, largely because scholars concentrate on arriving migrants, se lement, and community building.28 Jewish humanitarian organizations held li le sway over state officials. They could not prevent the more restrictive handling of immigrants by the U.S. authorities, nor could they stop the repeated deportations of unwanted foreigners from Prussia. Yet government officials on the

Points of Passage • 13

ground recognized the benefits of collaborating with humanitarian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as the Hilfsverein or, as Weber highlights in his essay, the Anglo-Jewish Board of Guardians. Private Jewish (and other) migrant aid organizations could solve problems quite efficiently, not least by covering the costs for unwanted migrants. In return, aid organizations protected migrants against abuse and rigidly applied administrative solutions. For instance, when the Prussian government decided to expel several thousand illegal Russian-Jewish immigrants from Berlin in 1906, it consulted with the Hilfsverein. The aid organization could not prevent the deportation, but it was able to redirect most deportees to the United States.29 On the other side of Atlantic, the U.S. immigration commissioner allowed Jewish and other humanitarian associations to open offices on Ellis Island. Here, too, humanitarian NGOs were granted access in part because they relieved the state of a considerable financial and logistical burden.30 The other major nongovernmental players in the history of the transatlantic mass migration from and through Europe between 1880 and 1914 were the European steamship lines. Business historians have shown li le interest in the social history of maritime travel, not to mention the relationship between leading managers and state officials.31 Likewise, migration scholars tend to ignore the role of the steamship lines in the history of intercontinental mass movement between 1850 and 1950. Studying the paths of migration between 1850 and 1950 sheds light on the significant influence the major steamship lines exerted well beyond the port cities, especially in the period before 1914. The German case is particularly instructive. The interruption of the transatlantic traffic during the 1892 Hamburg cholera outbreak constituted a worst-case scenario, especially for the Hamburg-Amerikanische Paketfahrt Aktiengesellscha (Hamburg-America Line; HAPAG). In response, HAPAG and the other leading German steamship line, the Bremen-based North German Lloyd (NDL), proposed to privatize the transmigration from the German border with the Russian and AustroHungarian Empires to the United States. A er several months of lobbying, the initially skeptical Prussian government in Berlin capitulated. From 1893–1894 until 1914 HAPAG and NDL assumed responsibility for all transmigrants, from the moment they crossed the border into Germany until they disembarked from one of their liners at an overseas destination. The steamship lines covered all costs associated with an involuntary return journey. The pivot of the overhauled transit migration system through imperial Germany was the so-called control station. In 1893–1894, HAPAG and NDL employees erected and operated several stations, consisting of a few small barracks, at the major rail crossings

14 • Tobias Brinkmann

along the German border with the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Following the model of the Ruhleben screening station, all control stations along the Russian border were equipped with disinfection facilities. Migrants had to pass an inspection and to undergo disinfection; they then were issued a certificate that was required to board the HAPAG or NDL steamer in Hamburg or Bremen. A police officer, whose salary was covered by the steamship lines, led all migrants who did not pass the examination back across the nearby border. Migrants were well advised to enter the control stations voluntarily because they risked rejection if they encountered state officials during the transit and could not produce the certificate. The steamship lines, recognizing that some migrants would bypass the control stations, also installed disinfection facilities at the ports to address concerns by the American immigration authorities. To improve the effectiveness of the system even more, growing numbers of transmigrants were transported through Germany in sealed emigrant trains; this is the subject of the essay by Nicole Kvale Eilers in this volume. She argues that the transit system was never as efficient as envisaged by its creators. Nevertheless, the U.S. immigration commissioner was full of praise for the control station system before it was even implemented: Germany, the commissioner commented in 1894, was “protecting itself against undesirable immigrants … and at the same time protecting us.”32 Germany was of course not the only country that witnessed a massive rise in transit migration a er 1880. The stricter controls and rejections implemented by the United States in the mid 1880s and especially the opening of Ellis Island and other immigration stations in and after 1892 led to a rising migration via Canadian ports and across the unguarded northern border of the United States. In response, the U.S. immigration commissioner stationed inspectors at the major Canadian ports in 1893–1894 and established control posts at the major border crossings. The Canadian authorities had inspected arriving immigrants at their entry port on Grosse Île for contagious disease since the 1830s. The handling of transmigrants in Canada a er 1893 also betrays the influential position of the steamship lines. U.S. immigration inspectors were stationed at Canadian ports a er negotiations between the U.S. immigration commissioner and the (mostly British) steamship lines serving Canadian ports, and with Canadian railroad companies that transported migrants to the United States. The immigration commissioner threatened to ban companies from serving ports and train stations in the United States if they did not cooperate. Although the presence of U.S. officials in Canadian ports infringed on British (and Canadian) sovereignty, London welcomed this move. A er all, U.S. of-

Points of Passage • 15

ficials helped to reduce the number of undesirable immigrants trying to se le in Canada, or being returned to Canada by the United States.33 During the 1880s and 1890s, HAPAG and NDL established a dominant position in the eastern European passenger market. The two German lines owed their strong position largely to the favorable location of Germany. The train line through Germany was the shortest route from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires to the North Sea ports. The direct journey from a Russian port to Britain or America was an option for only few Russian subjects because it was almost impossible to leave the Russian Empire legally. Service from the imperial ports was limited and migrants had to pass an inspection by Russian state officials. Russia’s long land border was relatively easy to cross, with the help of smugglers. The authorities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire did allow emigration, but young males intending to evade military service were well advised to avoid official border crossings and ports on the Adriatic Sea. Thus, geography and political circumstances favored Germany, turning it into a key transit country for eastern European migrants bound for western Europe and overseas, and providing the two established German steamship lines with a unique advantage over their foreign competitors. Yet, just when the German lines were establishing a presence in eastern Europe, the rejection of problematic migrants in America and the heavy-handed response by the Prussian authorities in the mid 1880s appeared to threaten their position. A er negotiating special privileges for passengers with HAPAG or NDL tickets in the late 1880s, the control station system—that is, the de facto privatization of the eastern border control—reinforced the powerful position of the two German lines. For the Prussian state, this solution was acceptable because the steamship lines covered all costs associated with the mass transit migration. For the steamship lines (and their stockholders) these costs were negligible in comparison to the huge profits the eastern European migration yielded.34 To secure their lucrative position in eastern Europe, HAPAG and NDL launched a price-fixing cartel, the Atlantic Conference, between 1893 and 1895, dividing the European market with British and other western European lines and fixing prices at relatively high levels. But the cartel was not stable. Repeatedly, the western European lines tried to break into the eastern European market, triggering price wars. During the 1904–1905 Atlantic rate war, ticket prices dropped to record lows. Nevertheless, as Drew Keeling argues in his essay, changing prices and conditions had only a limited impact on the overall level of transatlantic migration, although sometimes ticket prices affected the routes chosen by migrants. Partly to evade the German control system but not least

16 • Tobias Brinkmann

because of lower costs and more superficial medical checks, some Jewish migrants traveled to the United States from the Baltic ports Libau (today Liepāja, Latvia) and Riga in the Russian Empire via Britain. The port city of Hull on the North Sea emerged as Britain’s most important point of arrival; the train journey to the large transatlantic port of Liverpool was short and inexpensive. Hundreds of migrants (a tiny minority in proportionate terms but very significant in absolute numbers) se led down along the transit corridor, boosting existing small Jewish communities, in Leeds, Bradford, and Manchester.35 Transmigration through Scandinavia was another option. The little-known Jewish migration via Sweden is the subject of Carl Henrik Carlsson’s essay in this volume. Between 1880 and 1914, the Danish Thingvalla Line/DFDS (Det Forenede Dampskibs-Selskab or United Steamship Company) was the only line that connected Scandinavia with North America. It transported mainly Danish and Norwegian emigrants, also some Swedes—and Russian Jews. DFDS had an extensive network of steamship routes linking Copenhagen with ports around the Baltic. Between 1900 and 1908, it transported one hundred fi een thousand Russian (mainly Jewish) emigrants from the Russian port Libau to Hull. In his essay, Per Kristian Sebak examines the li leknown involvement of Scandinavian lines in the transatlantic migration of Jews from the Russian Empire.36 The role of the German steamship lines as gatekeepers was highly ambiguous, especially at Germany’s eastern border. There can be li le doubt, however, that the Prussian authorities would have handled the controls more arbitrarily and ruthlessly. Nevertheless, at the very moment when they crossed the border into Germany, transmigrants entered an extralegal sphere. At any point during the journey they faced rejection, and they could do li le to defend themselves against abuse by employees of the steamship lines at the control stations, railway personnel, and also members of the ship’s crew. Transmigrants could not easily defend themselves against such a acks because they risked immediate rejection and deportation had they done so. Only when they reached Ellis Island did transmigrants have access to legal counsel; only then could they appeal decisions taken by immigration officials.37 Transmigrants, however, were not entirely unprotected during their journey. Investigative journalists repeatedly traveled through the German transit corridor and on British ocean liners documenting their experiences and the behavior of the crew.38 The informal impact of nongovernmental actors, such as the media, transnational Jewish aid organizations, and not least the steamship lines, on the conditions of the

Points of Passage • 17

(trans-)migration was considerable even though their formal influence in the political sphere was negligible.

After 1914 World War I brought a period of relatively free migration across the Atlantic to an end. The complete breakdown of the established political and social order across central and eastern Europe between 1914 and the early 1920s constituted a major turning point in the history of European, transatlantic, and Jewish migration. The official end of the war in 1918 was followed by a series of lengthy and intense conflicts between different military and paramilitary forces across eastern and southeastern Europe, permanently uprooting millions of civilians. The looming refugee wave from eastern Europe and the specter of Communism provided anti-immigration forces in the United States with the necessary momentum to push restrictive immigration legislation through both houses of Congress in 1921 and 1924. The restrictive quota laws of the early 1920s effectively closed America’s doors and reduced the annual number of eastern European migrants to less than 10 percent of the pre-1914 levels. This occurred just when the pressure to leave eastern Europe was greater than ever. These laws also largely excluded southern Europeans and migrants from Asia. Other immigration countries such as Canada, Brazil, and Argentina also tightened their immigration policies, partly in response to Washington’s closed-door policy.39 Thus, a er 1918, millions of o en destitute migrants and persons displaced by the war were stranded all over Europe along the old east–west corridor; at railroad hubs such as Warsaw, Prague, Vienna, Leipzig, Berlin, Brussels, and Paris; in big port cities like Hamburg, Ro erdam, Antwerp, Southampton, London, Liverpool, and Le Havre; and along new and old border crossings. In many of these places makeshi camps were built. One of the largest was the Atlantic Park Hostel outside Southampton, in the south of England. This huge camp housed several thousand Jews and other eastern Europeans who could not continue their journey to America. The train station in the northwest German city Osnabrück, close to an important German-Dutch border crossing, experienced chaotic conditions as hundreds of indigent Jewish migrants en route to Ro erdam were stranded there in 1920. Similar scenes unfolded across Europe during this period.40 The emergence of new nation-states such as Poland led to the creation of new borders and new citizenship regimes. With the collapse of the empires, many Jewish refugees lost their citizenship without au-

18 • Tobias Brinkmann

tomatically receiving the citizenship of a successor state. A er World War I, persons could cross international borders only with a valid passport, and o en a visa issued by an embassy of the respective destination or transit country. Since stateless people possessed no valid papers, hundreds of thousands of Jews, Armenians, and Russian opponents of Bolshevism were deprived of mobility in the a ermath of the war. A significant two hundred fi y thousand Jews managed to immigrate to the United States between 1920 and 1925 before the restrictive immigration laws were fully implemented. Others returned to countries that had not existed when they had le , stayed put, or went to the few open countries, notably France that partly replaced the United States as a relatively safe haven for eastern Europeans before the Depression. The rise of Jewish immigration to Palestine in the mid 1920s was a direct consequence of American immigration restrictions; the challenging economic circumstances explain why the remigration rates were high.41 The period between 1880 and 1914 witnessed the rise of gradual restrictions on global migration but the overwhelming majority of migrants were able to reach their intended destination relatively easily, thanks in part to the influential position of the steamship lines and Jewish humanitarian organizations. A er World War I, the steamship lines and humanitarian NGOs were marginalized by the state. All migrants faced increasing restrictions in the postwar years, but stateless persons were in a particularly precarious position. The closed-door policy of the United States and other immigration countries caught many migrants in a state best described as permanent transit. The situation worsened in the 1930s in the wake of the Depression and during the rise of the Nazi regime. Jewish migrants and refugees stranded in permanent transit were particularly vulnerable to Nazi persecution. More than two-thirds of the Jews deported from France to German extermination camps a er 1941 were foreign or stateless Jews. This number includes Jews who had se led in France during the 1920s and had become French citizens. A er 1940, the Vichy regime denaturalized them. The loss of citizenship deprived these individuals of the last formal protection they had enjoyed.42 In the 1960s, the airplane replaced the steamship as the preferred mode of transport for long- and medium-distance travel. Journeys that once took several days or even weeks now take only a few hours, and international airports have emerged as the new points of passage. Yet the obstacles confronted by transmigrants before and a er 1914 have hardly disappeared. Most international airports have detention facilities for unwanted migrants. The extraterritorial status of these quasi-

Points of Passage • 19

prisons makes it hard for detained migrants to request legal counsel, let alone to apply for asylum status, because they have not officially entered the respective country. Most migrants, of course, never make it that far. Like the steamship lines at the Prussian control stations, the airlines perform remote control measures on behalf of the destination countries by checking the increasingly sophisticated passports of international travelers before departure, sometimes transmi ing passenger data to the authorities in the destination country. Just like the steamship lines then, airlines today face considerable penalties if they take undesirables on board. As before, migrants looking for work who cannot enter through the main door opt for increasingly dangerous illegal detours by crossing land borders on foot or by using primitive boats. Even now the perception of migrants from distant countries cuts across the political divide, producing coalitions of strange bedfellows. The shrinking of time and space has only increased the threat of the spreading of contagious disease, as the recent impact of the SARS epidemic in Southeast Asia has shown. It remains to be seen whether medical inspection facilities will be reintroduced at main points of the passage, as was discussed during the outbreak of the swine flu in 2009.

Notes 1. On Jewish immigration see, e.g., Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews 1870–1914 (Cambridge, MA, 1962); Irving Howe, The World of Our Fathers (New York, 1976); Nancy Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-toWork: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in the Women’s Garment Trade in Paris and New York (Durham, NC, 1997); Lloyd Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant in England 1870–1914 (London, 1960); Eli Lederhendler, Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism 1880–1920 (Cambridge, UK, 2009); Victor A. Mirelman, Jewish Buenos Aires, 1890–1930: In Search of an Identity (Detroit, MI, 1990); Jeffrey Lesser, “The Immigration and Integration of Polish Jews in Brazil, 1924–1934,” The Americas 51 (1994): 173–91. 2. Rebecca Kobrin, Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora (Bloomington, IN, 2010), 19–68. 3. Vincent J. Cannato, American Passage: The History of Ellis Island (New York, 2010), 11. 4. Tobias Brinkmann, “Why Paul Nathan A acked Albert Ballin: The Transatlantic Mass Migration and the Privatization of Prussia’s Eastern Border Inspection, 1886–1914,” Central European History 43 (2010): 47–83; Annual Report of the Surgeon General of the Public Health and Marine-Hospital Service of the United States for the Fiscal Year 1911 (Washington, DC, 1912), 99–103 (German inspections), 182–3 (American inspections in China).

20 • Tobias Brinkmann

5. Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 264–7; Dorothee Schneider, “The United States Government and the Investigation of European Emigration in the Open Door Era,” in Citizenship and Those Who Leave: The Politics of Emigration and Expatriation, ed. N. Green and F. Weil (Urbana, IL, 2007), 195–210; Brinkmann, “Why Paul Nathan A acked Albert Ballin.” 6. See, e.g., Emigrant Conditions in Europe (vol. 4), in 61st Congress, 3rd Session, Senate, Reports of the Immigrant Commission, presented by Mr. Dillingham (Washington, DC, 1911), 93–97; for background, see Dorothee Schneider, “The United States Government and the Investigation of European Emigration in the Open Door Era,” in Citizenship and Those Who Leave: The Politics of Emigration and Expatriation, ed. N. Green and F. Weil (Urbana, 2007), 195–210; on Yiddish as a signifier for Jewish identity of immigrants, see Eric Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, 2006), 104. 7. Hans Rogger, “Tsarist Policy on Jewish Emigration,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 3 (1973): 26–36. 8. An exception are the works by Gur Alroey; see esp. Gur Alroey, “Information, Decision, and Migration: Jewish Emigration from Eastern Europe in the Early Twentieth Century,” Immigrants & Minorities 29 (2011): 33–63. None of the innovative essays of a recently published volume on the history of the shtetl addresses migration: S. Katz, ed., The Shtetl: New Evaluations (New York, 2007); several researchers at the University of Vienna are working on a project on migration within and from Galicia, see esp. Annemarie Steidl, “‘There are no cats in America …’. Zur Teilnahme von Juden und Jüdinnen an transatlantischen Wanderungen aus den österreichischen Ländern der Habsburgermonarchie,” Aschkenas 17 (2009): 13–34; see also Kobrin, Jewish Bialystok, 20–21. 9. Simon Kuznets, “Immigration of Russian Jews to the United States: Background and Structure,” Perspectives in American History 9 (1975): 35–124; Lloyd Gartner, “Jewish Migrants En Route from Europe to North America: Traditions and Realities,” Jewish History 1 (1986): 49–66; John D. Klier, “Emigration Mania in Late-Imperial Russia: Legend and Reality,” in Pa erns of Emigration, 1850–1914, ed. A. Newman and S.W. Massil (London, 1996), 21–30; Israel Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772–1881 (Philadelphia, 2005), 143–56; John D. Klier, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882 (Cambridge, UK, 2011), 296–323. 10. Annemarie Steidl, Engelbert Stockhammer, and Hermann Zeitlhofer, “Relations among Internal, Continental, and Transatlantic Migration in Late Imperial Austria,” Social Science History 31 (2007): 61–92; see also Alroey, “Information, Decision, and Migration,” 33–63. 11. Ewa Morawska, “Polish-Jewish Relations in North America, 1880–1940: Old Elements, New Configurations,” in Polish-Jewish Relations in North America, ed. M.B. Biskupski and A. Polonsky (Oxford, 2007), 71–86. 12. Mark Wischnitzer, To Dwell in Safety: The Story of Jewish Migration since 1800 (Philadelphia, 1948).

Points of Passage • 21

13. Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work; Morawska, “Polish-Jewish Relations,” 71–86; for a combination of emigration and immigration perspectives see D. Hoerder and J. Nagler, eds., People in Transit: German Migrations in Comparative Perspective, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, UK, 1995). 14. Adam McKeown, “Global Migration, 1846–1940,” Journal of World History, 15 (2004): 155–90; Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham, NC, 2002), 331–404. 15. Gartner, “Jewish Migrants En Route,” 49–66; see the essays in R. Roth and M. Polino, eds., The City and the Railway in Europe (Aldershot, UK, 2003). 16. See, e.g., a recently published collection of immigrant le ers: Gur Alroey, Bread to Eat & Clothes to Wear: Le ers from Jewish Migrants in the Early Twentieth Century (Detroit, MI, 2011). 17. Bernhard Felsenthal, “Reisenotizen (1854–1857),” Felsenthal Papers (Collection 153), American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, OH; Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York, 2002), 134–5; Marianna O’Gallagher, Grosse Île. Gateway to Canada 1832–1937 (Ste-Foy, QC, 1984); Per Kristian Sebak, Titanic’s Predecessor: The S/S Norge Disaster of 1904 (Laksevaag, Norway, 2004). 18. Mary Antin, From Plotzk to Boston (Boston, 1899), 40. 19. Antin, From Plotzk to Boston, 26, 42. 20. Ibid., 51. 21. Michael Just, Ost- und südosteuropäische Amerikawanderung: 1881–1914. Transitprobleme in Deutschland und Aufnahme in den Vereinigten Staaten (Stu gart, Germany, 1988), 111; Zosa Szajkowski, “Suffering of Jewish Emigrants to America in Transit through Germany,” Jewish Social Studies, 29 (1977): 105– 16; Vorwärts (Berlin), 1 May 1905. 22. Aristide R. Zolberg, “The Great Wall Against China: Responses to the First Immigration Crisis, 1885–1925,” in Migration, Migration History, History, ed. L. and J. Lucassen (Berne, Switzerland, 1997), 291–315, quote: 314. 23. Adam M. McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York, 2008); on the role of nongovernmental actors in the European transmigration, see Brinkmann, “Why Paul Nathan A acked Albert Ballin,” 47–83. 24. Schneider, “The United States Government,” 195–210; Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30th 1894 (Washington, DC, 1894), 17–19; Annual Report of the Surgeon General of the Public Health and Marine-Hospital Service of the United States, for the Fiscal Year 1904 (Washington, DC, 1904), 188–93 (Yokohama, Nagasaki, Kobe, and Shanghai), 217 (Naples and Palermo). 25. Richard Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years 1830–1910 (Oxford, 1987); Howard Markel, Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892 (Baltimore, 1997); Amy L. Fairchild, Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force (Baltimore, 2004); Barbara Lüthi, Invading Bodies: Medizin und Immigration in den USA 1880–1920 (Frankfurt am Main, 2009).

22 • Tobias Brinkmann

26. Colin Holmes, John Bull’s Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871–1971 (London, 1988). 27. Brinkmann, “Why Paul Nathan A acked Albert Ballin.” 28. Rainer Liedtke, Jewish Welfare in Hamburg and Manchester, c. 1850–1914 (Oxford, 1998); Tobias Brinkmann, “From Hinterberlin to Berlin: Jewish Migrants from Eastern Europe in Berlin before and a er 1918,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 7 (2008): 339–55; V. Dohrn and G. Pickhan, eds., Transit und Transformation: Osteuropäisch-jüdische Migranten in Berlin, 1918 bis 1939 (Gö ingen, Germany, 2010). 29. Jack Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany (New York, 1987), 48, 61; Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums (Leipzig), 13 April 1906. 30. Louis Anthes, Lawyers and Immigrants, 1870–1940: A Cultural History (Levi own, NY, 2003), 53–90; Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society, Third Annual Report (1911) (New York, 1912), 14–15. 31. The most detailed overview for the period up to 1914 remains Erich Murken, Die großen transatlantischen Linienreederei-Verbände, Pools und Interessengemeinscha en bis zum Ausbruch des Weltkrieges: Ihre Entstehung, Organisation und Wirksamkeit (Jena, Germany, 1922); see also T. Feys, L. R. Fischer, S. Hoste, and S. Vanfraechem, eds., Maritime Transport and Migration: The Connections Between Maritime and Migration Networks (St. Johns, NL, 2007). 32. Tobias Brinkmann, “‘Travelling with Ballin’: The Impact of American Immigration Policies on Jewish Transmigration within Central Europe, 1880– 1914,” International Review of Social History 53 (2008): 459–84; Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30th 1894, 16 (quote); Nicole Kvale Eilers, Emigrant Trains: Migratory Transportation Networks Through Germany and the United States, 1847–1914, (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2009). 33. O’Gallagher, Grosse Île; Erika Lee, “Enforcing the Borders: Chinese Exclusion along the U.S. Borders with Canada and Mexico, 1882–1924,” Journal of American History 89 (2002): 54–86. 34. Bernhard Karlsberg, History and Importance of the German Control of Emigrants in Transit (Hamburg, 1922), 10–44; Rogger, “Tsarist Policy on Jewish Emigration,” 26–36; Brinkmann, “Why Paul Nathan A acked Albert Ballin.” 35. Nicholas J. Evans, “The Port Jews of Libau, 1880–1914,” in Jews and Port Cities, 1590–1990: Commerce, Community and Cosmopolitanism, ed. D. Cesarani and G. Romain (London, 2006), 197–214; Nicholas J. Evans, “Indirect Passage from Europe: European Transmigration via the UK, 1836– 1914,” Journal for Maritime Research 2001 (h p://www.jmr.nmm.ac.uk/ server/show/conJmrArticle.28). 36. Drew Keeling, “The Business of Transatlantic Migration between Europe and the USA, 1900–1914,” Journal of Economic History 66 (2006): 476–80; Carl Henrik Carlsson, Medborgarskap och Diskriminering: Östjudar och andra Invandrare i Sverige 1860–1920 [Naturalisation and discrimination. Eastern Jews and other Immigrants in Sweden, 1860–1920] (Uppsala, Sweden, 2004). 37. Anthes, Lawyers and Immigrants, 53–90.

Points of Passage • 23

38. Julius Kaliski, “Mit Ballin Unterwegs,” Vorwärts (Berlin): 20, 23, 27 December 1904, 5, 10 January 1905; “Steerage to Canada—The Truth about the Horrors of Emigration to the ‘Land of Promise,’” Reynold’s Newspaper (London), 18 September 1910. The U.S. immigration commissioner repeatedly dispatched inspectors disguised as migrants to Europe to check the effectiveness of the remote control system; see Schneider, “The United States Government.” 39. Zolberg, A Nation By Design, 243–92. 40. Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted—European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1985); Tony Kushner and Katherine Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide (London, 1999), 19–102; Mark Wischnitzer, “Die Tätigkeit des Hilfsvereins in den Nachkriegsjahren mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Auswandererfürsorge,” in Festschri Anlässlich des 25-Jährigen Bestehens des Hilfsvereins der Deutschen Juden (Berlin, 1926), 47–59. 41. Marrus, The Unwanted; Harry S. Linfield, Jewish Migration: Jewish Migration as Part of World Migration Movements 1920–1930 (New York, 1933); Michael Traub, Jüdische Wanderbewegungen vor und nach dem Weltkriege (Berlin, 1930). 42. Eugene M. Kulischer, Jewish Migrations: Past Experiences and Post-War Prospects (New York, 1943); Jacob Lestschinsky, Jewish Migration for the Past Hundred Years (New York, 1944); Marc Vishniak, The Legal Status of Stateless Persons (New York, 1945); Patrick Weil, How to be French: Nationality in the Making since 1789 (Durham, NC, 2008), 87–124.

PART I

@

MEDICALIZATION OF BORDERS

@1 GERMS OF ANARCHY, CRIME, DISEASE, AND DEGENERACY Jewish Migration to the United States and the Medicalization of European Borders around 1900 Barbara Lüthi

In a fervent call to enforce American immigration restrictions in Europe, the American publicist James Davenport Whelpley stated in a 1905 magazine article that even good laws and an intelligent government were not always effective in preventing “paupers, criminals and deficients” from leaving European countries. He added, “[N]ever for a moment can vigilance relax in the administration of the American exclusion laws. The situation is grave and threatening. … An emigration tide unless thoroughly policed carries with it the germs of anarchy, crime, disease and degeneracy.” Nevertheless, Whelpley stressed the “tremendous progress” in the field of migration control throughout the world pointing to the “uniformity of law and administration” and “greater regard among nations for one another’s safety” in the future. Whelpley expressed a widely shared sentiment of the need for international migration control.1 In recent years, migration historians have traced the rise of restrictive immigration measures in Europe and North America toward the end of the nineteenth century to several factors, such as the sheer volume of population movements, the rise of organized labor and increasingly violent conflicts between employers and immigrant workers, the emergence of nationalism, an emerging welfare state in need of protection, and, as Aristide Zolberg has put it, an “upward spiral of restriction.”2 Several historians have stressed the imperial dimension of migration control as well as the changing structures of state power.3 As political scientist Aristide Zolberg emphasizes, while “most leading countries were becoming liberal democracies, … this was combined with an expanding and more centralized state apparatus.”4 States were increasingly resorting to internal and external intervention to fend off certain threats. In the United States, Germany, and Britain, the emergence of

28 • Barbara Lüthi

the modern state had a crucial impact on the rising restrictive migration regimes at the turn of the century. These states regulated the question of belonging through the granting (or denial) of citizenship. State institutions and politicians were not the only actors who shaped migration policies. A number of other players, including railroad companies, privately owned steamship lines, and other entities, were also involved. Many studies on the regulation of global movement have emphasized the interaction of new technologies, state institutions, legal structures, and categorizations that have made international borders the primary site of regulation of migration. Although this was a fairly late development with its onset in the 1880s, by the 1930s practices that were developed “to fortify the edges of the international system” represented the “foundation of sovereignty and migration control” for all states within the international system.5 Still, until recently most authors discussing these changes in migration control have concentrated on the nation-state as the main actor. But, as social scientists have argued, in the face of rapid international changes regarding migration control, a comprehensive analysis can be reached only by transcending the national framework.6 Yet, looking beyond the national framework does not mean the nation-state was irrelevant. Instead, I follow Donna Gabaccia’s assumption that migrations have encouraged nation building. In this understanding, the intensity of mass migrations of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century may actually help to explain the rise of nationalist movements and the focus of national states on ideological nation building in the years prior to World War I.7 Over the past two hundred years, mass migration and the consolidation of an international system of nation-states have gone hand in hand. In this context, the linking of medicine and immigration has a long history. Nationalized public health practices became deeply enmeshed in the political strategies of the United States and European countries, which were preoccupied with the defense of their perceived cultures.8 The professionalization of medicine and rapid advances in transport technology, both of which allowed people but also diseases to be more mobile, explain why public health policies became an integral part of guarding the nation. This essay discusses the medicalization of migration control from a transnational and comparative perspective, focusing on the United States, Germany, and Britain between 1880 and 1920. It deals primarily with Jewish migrants who originated in the Russian and AustroHungarian Empires as well as in Romania. Jews in eastern Europe did not form a homogeneous community, nor did their migration pa erns show an exclusive pa ern compared to other migrant groups. In con-

Germs of Anarchy, Crime, Disease, and Degeneracy • 29

centrating on Jewish migrants, I am less interested in their treatment as a separate group within the system of migration control than I am in their depiction as “others” in political debates and the media. The decision to focus on the three countries is guided by the fact that Germany and Britain were important transit or countries of se lement, and the United States played a constitutive role in the formation of migration control in the northern Atlantic and Europe between 1880 and 1920. First, I will trace public debates surrounding Jewish immigration and their effects on new legislation in all three countries. Questions of hygiene and public health loomed large in these debates, mainly targeting migrants from eastern Europe. Second, I will analyze the micropolitics of migration control and administrative practices on the ground. One related theme is developed throughout: the evolution of migration control and its infrastructure in the three countries was deeply influenced by an imaginary East-West (and North-South) divide between so-called uncivilized versus civilized countries. Encounters between different peoples and migratory groups within and outside Europe found unprecedented expression from the nineteenth century onward. These encounters generated standardized categories for framing differences, such as nationality and race.9 The ideals of political communities formed by a people and their self-rule entailed the investment in exclusionary politics.10

The Perception of Eastern European Jews and the Rhetoric of Civilization Between 1881 and 1914, more than 2.5 million Jews le eastern Europe, overwhelmingly heading to the United States. A er 1890, Jews represented one of America’s largest immigrant groups. During this period, at least one hundred fi y thousand eastern European Jews se led in Britain. Germany prevented the se lement of Jews from eastern Europe but experienced a strong increase in Jewish transit migration from eastern Europe.11 The reasons for their departure were manifold and interrelated: strong population growth, the lack of opportunities, the dra , state discrimination, violent persecution, and especially economic decline.12 This massive movement had an enormous impact not only on the societies Jewish migrants le behind, but also on the ethnic-religious kaleidoscope of the receiving societies. Xenophobic and anti-Semitic rhetoric does not fully explain the rise of restrictive migration control and screening procedures in the United States, Britain, and Germany between 1880 and 1920, but points to an

30 • Barbara Lüthi

important transformation: if borders developed into a useful, symbolic, and practical tool within the national geopolitical matrix, then health and hygiene played a decisive role in defending the imaginary body politics against foreign invasions. In this context, especially, the image of the Ostjude (eastern Jew) symbolized widespread fears of a foreign invasion. The United States was a case in point. In 1912, Alfred Reed, of the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS), which was responsible for the medical inspections at the immigration stations, commented that the medical evidence as well as the racial purity did not speak in favor of the Hebrew. This was partly due to their predisposition to functional insanities and their physical development.13 The notion of the physical unfitness of Jewish migrants arriving at America’s shores and doubt as to their racial capacity for assimilation because of their supposedly oriental origins were widespread. Several researchers have argued that the debates on Jewish immigration around 1900 must be understood in the general context of reactions toward the arrival of the new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.14 In contrast, I argue that the immigration problem betrayed a specific concern regarding the socalled Jewish problem. The wealth of articles in periodical and scientific literature as well as evidence of administrative debates during that period illustrate the obsession with the so-called Jewish question which played a constitutive part both in the regimes of representation and in administrative practice.15 The discourse was o en rather ambiguous and included positive as well as negative images of the Jews. But a powerful semiotic system suggesting the pathological and racial otherness of the Jew over decades firmly asserted that Jews could be integrated into the national body only with severe damage to its racial and moral integrity and purity. Racialized theories propagated the physical, mental, and moral inferiority of the Jews vis-à-vis the Anglo-Saxon and peoples of northern and western Europe.16 One specific aspect that influenced medical border inspections in the United States was the debate surrounding the supposed mental disorder and poor physique of the Jewish arrivals.17 USPHS medical officers, clearly influenced by this debate, confirmed the physical and mental inferiority of Jewish arrivals they examined.18 Thomas Salmon and J.G. Wilson, both assistant surgeons for the USPHS on Ellis Island, linked the large numbers of immigrants in mental institutions to the new arrivals, among them Jews. Wilson described Jews as “a highly inbred and psychopathically inclined race.”19 The question of the poor physique garnered special a ention when it became one of the most common causes for medical certification in 1905 and was closely linked

Germs of Anarchy, Crime, Disease, and Degeneracy • 31

to the physical image of the tubercular Jew. This image became more elaborate as the century progressed. Nativists like E.A. Ross described the Jews as wasted, hollow chested, undersized, and weak-muscled. Even Jewish physicians such as Maurice Fishberg partly adopted the image of the biologically inferior Jew.20 Whereas the bluntness with which eastern European Jews were stigmatized as physically and mentally inferior drew on popular national and international discourses, their precarious status within the white race was amplified by their representation as Asians, Orientals, and people of African descent.21 Although scientists and eugenicists did not always agree about racial origins and purity, the categorization of Jews as an Asian race served as a useful ideological device for nativist restrictionists. Alluding to California’s success, barring Asians from white territory in the West, in his writings from 1920–1921 publicist Kenneth L. Roberts demanded to rigidly exclude Jewish “Asiatics” and “Mongoloids” in the East.22 The popular image of the pathological other relegated Jewish immigrants into a theoretical ghe o of biological difference.23 An American law from 1903 demanded that steamship lines classify passengers according to their race. Thus Jews, independent of their nationality and religion, were classified as Hebrews.24 During the same period, the discussion about Ostjuden increasingly preoccupied the German public, reinforcing long-held anti-Jewish stereotypes.25 Similar to the United States and Britain, eastern European Jews were associated with cultural backwardness, barbarism, le wing radicalism, and poverty. The rhetoric of an invasion from the East suggests a fear of competition on the labor market and a deep concern about the health of the nation. Although Jews had been associated with contagious diseases for centuries, at the end of the nineteenth century a new fear of epidemics was gaining momentum juxtaposed with remarkable advances in the field of bacteriology.26 Bacteriology in Germany slowly developed to become the most influential paradigm within the field of medicine, at least until the end of World War I.27 The focus on environmental and social factors was partially substituted with an etiologic understanding of contagion under the contagionist paradigm—meaning that the invading germ was now seen as originating in infected carriers from the outside. Admi edly, not all bacteriologists subscribed to this view. The strict dichotomy of inside/outside, however, turned into a central category of diagnosis, prophylaxis, and social intervention, and led to a preoccupation with the question of national borders. The breakthroughs in bacteriology delivered powerful arguments for the expansion of an interventionist state and carried a forceful political-imaginary dimension.28

32 • Barbara Lüthi

Germany represented the main transit country for Polish, Jewish, and other eastern European migrants traveling west. In addition, large numbers of Polish and Ruthenian labor migrants crossed the German border from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires due to the high demand for seasonal labor on Prussia’s agricultural estates. Against this backdrop, the linking of metaphors of bacteriological invasion and the contemporary perception of migration processes as infiltration was powerful. Renowned pathologists such as Rudolf Virchow and a number of political leaders warned against the “danger coming from the East.“29 Despite its need for labor, Germany was preoccupied with preventing these migrants from se ling permanently within its borders. In 1885, Prussia implemented a complex infrastructure of regulations and controls that made it possible to temporarily seal its borders and to deport unwanted migrants.30 The thorough regulation of labor migration was specifically a German feature. A high level of mobility went hand in hand with a politics of nationalization and a empts to exclude Polish and Jewish migrants. Anti-Semitic stereotypes were clearly enhanced by the fear of the aliens coming from the East and their implicitly Asiatic and contagious influences. The fear of Polonization (Polonisierung) also had anti-Semitic undertones, and Germans increasingly perceived strangers in racial terms. As Sebastian Conrad suggests, the German a itude and relation to its Polish neighbor during the late nineteenth century o en carried colonial connotations.31 During World War I and its a ermath, as millions were displaced across eastern Europe, German officials worried about the spread of typhus across the eastern border. The Prussian Medizinalrat (medical commissioner) Willführ stressed in 1921, “[T]he opposition between East and West teaches us why typhus has become an unknown disease in Germany, but remains common among our Eastern neighbors: in our German state, the much-envied order and cleanliness are prevalent and we enjoy a prosperity which is foreign to the large masses of people in other countries and who are missing what we call culture. Beyond the Eastern borders Unkultur [barbarism] is prevalent.”32 During this period, the Eastern border developed into a central space of construction for the German nation—in a literal but also very material sense. Whereas the contemporary German debates depicted Jewish and Polish immigration as a sanitary danger coming from a lower level of civilization, the legal infrastructure of control and deportation was considered as protecting Germany’s public health. The anti-alienism campaign in Britain, which was mainly directed against Jewish immigrants, also played an important role in enabling the native population to define its own ideas of nationhood and citi-

Germs of Anarchy, Crime, Disease, and Degeneracy • 33

zenship.33 Although there had been legislative precedents pertaining to the regulation of immigrants since the end of the eighteenth century, the Aliens Act of 1905 marked a crucial turning point. It heralded a new age of state interventionism.34 Whereas the contemporary debates on immigration concentrated almost exclusively on Polish and Russian Jews arriving in Britain since the 1880s, the 1890s witnessed a growing awareness that their arrival was not a temporary issue, but rather a long-lasting process. As Bernard Harris argues, it is necessary to look beyond the immediate context and take into account several factors shaping the response to Jewish immigration. The debates were not merely informed by an anti-Semitic or xenophobic discourse; rather, anti-Jewish immigration policy was closely connected to British debates about social policy, poverty, and pauperism. The question of alien immigration was of considerable interest to the medical profession, yet the commonly held perception of the supposedly physical inferiority of Jewish immigrants cannot be separated from the contrasting notion that Jews were just as healthy (or even healthier) than non-Jews and be er adapted to the strains of urban life.35 Jewish immigrants were depicted as unsanitary paupers with a lower level of comfort than that of native-born English workers; they crowded the cities, put pressure on the housing market, displaced native labor, and were drawn from the lowest sections of their societies. This in turn led to urban degeneration, lower standards of health, and a poor physique. A language of efficiency and empire was also part of the rhetoric influencing anti-immigrant sentiments; a serious concern existed with the health of the nation and the fear of deterioration among the working classes. As David Feldman has stated, the high influx of Russian immigrants “could only advance the decay of national intelligence and physique. … Restrictionists thus aligned their cause with other reforms inspired by the need to adjust to a world in which Britain’s industrial, commercial and naval pre-eminence was increasingly open to question.” The liberal British immigration policies were seen as a disadvantage compared with the restrictive laws enforced by Britain’s competitors, Germany and the United States. Immigrants also appeared as a cultural threat. The anti-alien movement not only depicted Jewish immigrants as detrimental to the native working class, but also drew “on powerful representations of daily life, in the home, the family and the locality, and by extension in the nation as well.”36 Although social and ideological differences existed within the anti-alien movement, the question of health and public hygiene generally played an important role. According to Harris, however, Jewish immigrants were also perceived in a positive light.37 Some public health officials, for example,

34 • Barbara Lüthi

disputed the depiction of the Jew as a member of a degenerate race, arguing that Jews actually possessed a significant degree of racial immunity to disease. Others highlighted the sanitary traditions of Jews, pointing to the special care Jewish parents displayed toward their children and to the higher standard of health of Jewish children. Still, the negative representation of their health did play an important role in the campaign to exclude Jewish immigrants. The prism of racial prejudice expressed itself in the language of political insiders and outsiders. Political outsiders, such as John Banister, supported the popular image of the Jews as an Asian race. Banister described Jews as “a fair specimen of the Asiatic brand of man. … It is only when [he] insists upon posing as a European, and being judged as a European, that one realizes what an obnoxious creature he is, and how u erly out of place in a European country and in European society.”38 Leading politicians, such as Maj. William Evans-Gordon, also called for restrictions specifically targeting Jews. Evans-Gordon argued before the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration in 1903 that the poorest and mostdisadvantaged sections of the Jewish population were most likely to migrate. The medical restrictions introduced by the United States and other countries would redirect the least healthy section of the Jewish emigrant population to Britain. Evans-Gordon’s was hardly an isolated voice. In 1905, the author John Davenport Whelpley was commissioned to represent American interests at Whitehall as British lawmakers worked on the Aliens Act. His memorandum to the secretary of the Department of Commerce and Labor in Washington, DC, reveals that the United States regarded Britain as a “breeding ground for the most undesirable class of immigrants” on their way to the United States, such as paupers, criminals and “deficients.”39 An informal cooperation in respect to migration control was highly desired in both countries. Whelpley mistrusted the efficiency of the medical inspections abroad. Despite o en-ambiguous representations, the belief that Jewish arrivals constituted a selection of the unfit had a strong impact on discussions about the alien menace both inside and outside Britain and the British parliament. Concerns about the low standard of living of Jewish immigrants, notably overcrowding and low standards of sanitation in Jewish homes and workshops, influenced the debate that led to the passage of the 1905 Aliens Act.40 Many commentators went to considerable lengths to distinguish between the native western Jews and the Jewish newcomers from eastern Europe. Although there were many individuals within and outside the Jewish community demonstrating a high level of immigrant health, the debates undoubtedly linked the image of the arriving Jews from eastern Europe to the threatening issue of public

Germs of Anarchy, Crime, Disease, and Degeneracy • 35

health, poverty, and the decay of civilization—even if this represented only one of many strands in the anti-immigration discourse. Two issues dominated the debates leading to restrictive immigration legislation during this period. Both point to the spatialization of disease in all three countries: First, mental maps were strongly influenced by the idea of a Kulturgefälle (cultural gradient) between West and East.41 Diseases and epidemics supposedly originated in the East, in culturally underdeveloped regions lacking hygiene and order. Especially in the German case, the “[b]acteriologists rallied to the defense of national borders, claiming that they were sustaining European civilization against microbial hordes.”42 The fear of an invasion coming from the East, expressed in numerous speeches as well as periodic and scientific literature, intersected with the fear of the invasion of contagion. As Edward Said has pointed out, the deployment of dichotomic oppositions constituted an integral part of the Orientalist discourse. In this binary worldview, the East and West were incompatible systems, and the Orient figured as a projection screen for negative characteristics. This, in response, required an elaborated policy of border control. The second spatialized imagery was nomadism. Disease and Jewish migrants were linked with rootlessness as well as uncontrolled, and sometimes illegal movement. Besides vagrants and the homeless, Russian and Polish-Jewish migrants were singled out as traveling germs.43 The imagery of a rigid dichotomy of East–West and of nomadism implied that the imagined collective self was rooted and territorial, whereas the others—imagined as flooding, invading masses—were deterritorial as well as deterritorializing.44 The common theme of these images was that they projected disease on migration and mobility.

The Administration of Border Control Toward the end of the nineteenth century, migrants traveling from eastern Europe westwards encountered increasing controls at borders. Jews migrating from eastern Europe used two main routes: One route crossed Germany and led to one of the North Sea ports (Hamburg, Bremen, Ro erdam, Antwerp, Le Havre, Liverpool, etc.). Another, lesscommon route led across Hungary (and sometimes via Odessa), to the Mediterranean ports of Fiume, Genoa, and Naples.45 On the German transit route, migrants had to undergo repeated medical inspections and o en harrowing disinfection procedures. A er the Hamburg cholera outbreak of 1892, all migrants from Russia bound for the United States had to spend several days in quarantine. The controls varied de-

36 • Barbara Lüthi

pending on epidemiological situations and local conditions, sporadic pressure from the United States, and the competence of different medical officers.46 The United States was the most significant actor in these developments. Several laws, aimed at restricting the entry of southern and eastern European as well as Chinese migrants, betrayed the impact of anti-immigrant forces. Starting with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, numerous restrictive laws and screening procedures were successively enacted, leading up to the National Origins Quota Acts in 1921 and 1924. The laws and procedures as well as growing numbers of immigration stations, such as Ellis Island, came to form quasi-legal spaces from which the public was largely restricted. The inspections on Ellis Island ensured that contract laborers, prostitutes, criminals, people with contagious diseases, mental aberrations, those with a poor physique, and persons likely to become public charges could not enter the country. The impact of an increasingly restrictive American policy abroad was already discernible in the 1880s. Transmigrants were prevented from crossing Germany’s eastern borders or from boarding transatlantic steamships at European ports if European officials decided they might be rejected by American immigrant inspectors.47 The administrative procedures on Ellis Island, which constituted the largest port of entry between 1892 and the late 1920s, are well documented.48 It is especially important to understand the symbolic but also political meaning of the elaborate migration control. Here the advent of the germ theory of disease was applied to reshape public health perspectives with respect to national borders. As the medical officer Alfred Reed explained, immigration was one of the most serious problems for the country, and Ellis Island was the location “where the needs and dangers of the country in this regard are focused.”49 This conviction led to intensified efforts for devising protective screens. At Ellis Island, science and bureaucratic efficiency combined forces to protect the physical health and social vitality of the nation. The migrants’ health was assessed during the medical inspection of the USPHS. The medical inspection of third-class (herea er steerage) and second-class passengers on Ellis Island resembled a rite of passage in which the examination marked the change of social status of individual migrants in the line. The line transformed the migrants into potential citizens of the country, a er their bodies had been subjected to an evaluation of their industrial fitness and measured in terms of national notions of purity. Between 1892 and 1930, USPHS inspected more than 2.5 million immigrants. USPHS rejected only about 3 percent of all arrivals every year for medical reasons.50 Several factors explain the low rate of rejections:

Germs of Anarchy, Crime, Disease, and Degeneracy • 37

American Jewish immigrant aid organizations successfully challenged many rejections on medical or other grounds. The Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society and American Jewish leaders could mitigate restrictive administrative decisions on Ellis Island. Ultimately, however, American Jewish leaders had limited leverage to push for a more liberal migration policy.51 The most important factor behind the low rejection rates at Ellis Island can be traced to the increasing controls on the other side of the Atlantic. Many migrants en route to the United States were returned before they even reached the European ports. Looking beyond the confines of American history, one can clearly recognize the impact of the restrictive American immigration policies on transit countries such as Britain and Germany. In 1893, the United States passed the Quarantine Act in response to the 1892 cholera epidemic in Hamburg. In Germany, emigrating Russian Jews were blamed (mistakenly) for having caused the outbreak. As a result, all Russian subjects and suspected migrants had to be disinfected at a European port before embarkation, and American officials required proof of this procedure.52 Since the 1890s, the United States increasingly determined international border controls for persons traveling across Europe en route to North America. By 1914, Britain as well as Germany (and especially Prussia) had introduced elaborate means to monitor and restrict so-called problematic migrants. German law prohibited eastern European migrants from interrupting their journeys. Migrants frequently traveled through the German transit corridor in sealed railway carriages—unless they decided to cross the green border and avoid the officially travel routes.53 When the American Jewish physician and medical author Maurice Fishberg was sent to Europe by the U.S. Immigration Bureau to assess the trachoma problem among immigrants, he noted that the German steamship companies’ doctors isolated the poorest emigrants (regarded as the most likely disease carriers) at control stations along the German border.54 The train (and inspection) station Ruhleben, several miles outside Berlin, was a case in point: The passengers could not leave the train station of their own accord. They either boarded trains to Hamburg, Bremen, or another port city, or were taken back to the Eastern border if they did not meet American immigration regulations. In 1899, young Jewish immigrant Mashke Antin provided a rare description of the disinfection procedures she had experienced in Ruhleben during her German transit in 1894.55 Even though the disinfection processes were not a specific German invention or practice, they were nevertheless quite new and reflected the German administration’s efficiency in warding off contagious diseases.

38 • Barbara Lüthi

In 1893–1894, the German steamship lines (HAPAG and Lloyd) negotiated a formal agreement with the Prussian government allowing them to manage and finance transmigration, including the control and disinfection measures required by the United States through a system of control stations. Employees of the steamship lines substituted for state officials in rejecting migrants at the control stations. This gave them unprecedented financial opportunities in a very profitable (and competitive) business, but it should not be forgo en that the German transit system also offered a certain degree of protection against swindlers and criminals. German Jewish organizations, just like their American and British counterparts, supported destitute or diseased Jews during the transit journey.56 An efficient system of migration control was also in operation in Britain. Until World War I, a sizeable number of migrants from Germany and the Russian Empire chose the indirect route to the United States via Britain. There were several reasons for this choice, such as lower travel expenses, or, in the case of Jewish migrants, the possibility to restock on kosher food for the transatlantic journey.57 London was the main port of entry for arrivals intending to se le or to continue their travels a er a longer sojourn, while the Humberside ports of Hull and Grimsby handled the majority of the transmigrants traveling via Britain. The shortest route across England was from Hull across Yorkshire to Liverpool. As demands for service increased, the railway companies built facilities for migrants in transit. This not only eased the burden of indirect migration, but also prevented “the risk of potentially disease infected migrants mixing freely with the inhabitants of maritime towns and cities.”58 For Britain, the administrative procedures to which transmigrants and immigrants were subjected became more elaborate a er the passing of the Aliens Act in 1905. The Aliens Act as well as the Merchant Shipping Act of 1906 transferred legal responsibility for ensuring the migrants were transients to the shipping lines that were bringing them to Britain. Trade agreements and pooling between the lines bringing in migrants and those who shipped them from Britain guaranteed that they could not wander off at the ports of arrival in Britain. This clearly served as a protection for commercial shipping interests from the government and from commercial rivals. Increasingly, the system resembled and became part of the transit corridor for migrants on their way westwards (or sometimes also to other destinations). A er 1905, before disembarking the ship, immigration officers interrogated the arrivals at the ports and screened them for diseases.59 Although the medical inspections varied at different ports, here, too, only the steerage pas-

Germs of Anarchy, Crime, Disease, and Degeneracy • 39

sengers were inspected, while the first- and second-class passengers bypassed the procedure. Only known diseased immigrants had to undergo disinfection procedures, and only a small percent of all arrivals were rejected for medical reasons.60 Immigrants had to prove they could support themselves and their families. If they presented an actual threat to public health or were in a poor physical state and therefore judged unable to earn a living (through physical labor), they were refused entrance. This clearly was a reaction to the fear of immigrants and transmigrants forming a public health threat and corresponded to the demand to keep undesirable aliens out of the country. Similar to the American example, immigrants had the right to challenge the decisions of the authorities before an immigration board consisting of local citizens. With the passing of the Aliens Act in 1905, the British authorities had an instrument at hand to control migration at their borders.61

Conclusion The United States, Britain, and Germany each established a modern administrative infrastructure to contain unwanted migrants just before, or, as in the case of Britain, shortly a er the turn of the century. The medicalization of borders was an integral part of administrative procedures the state imposed on persons crossing the border. All three countries highlight how in the era of mass migration the state centralized migration policy and began to exclude non-nationals who had been categorized as undesirable. The medicalization of borders in Europe and the United States was also essential for classifying and dividing people into desirables and undesirables by linking the health of their individual body to the body politic. The fear of increasing poverty fueled antiimmigrant sentiments among the native-born population. Although more research is necessary, it appears safe to conclude that the instruments of migration control were unequally developed. According to Christiane Reinecke, Prussia pursued “a more authoritarian and interventionist” immigration policy than Britain, at least until the early twentieth century. The United States managed to shi its admission policies to major transit countries such as Germany and Britain. Despite its nationalizing effects, migration control was deeply embedded in the process of global integration. Mass migration and the specter of disease outbreak fostered cooperation and standardization of migration controls beyond the nation-state.62 Although the three countries shared some commonalities a er the turn of the century, such as the medical inspection of new arrivals or

40 • Barbara Lüthi

transmigrants at the national borders, their respective migration policies developed on different trajectories. Jewish migrants were portrayed as a homogeneous group and experienced racialized anti-Semitic discrimination linked to their physical capacity and sanitary habits in the United States, Britain, and Germany. In the United States, however, Jewish immigrants (unlike non-whites and unlike Jewish immigrants in Germany or Britain) were rarely denied citizenship once they had entered the country. In each country medicine (as well as anthropology and psychiatry) played an important role in categorizing eastern European Jews as racially different up to World War II.

Notes I would like to thank Bernard Harris for his helpful comments. 1. James D. Whelpley, “Control of Emigration in Europe,” North American Review 180, no. 6 (June 1905): 867. 2. On migration control in an international context, see A. Fahrmeir, O. Faron, and P. Weil, eds., Migration Control in the North Atlantic World: The Evolution of State Practices in Europe and the United States from the French Revolution to the Inter-War Period (New York, 2003); Aristide R. Zolberg “Global Movements, Global Walls: Responses to Migration, 1885–1925,” in Global History and Migrations, ed. W. Gungwu (Boulder, CO, 1997), 279–307, 280 (quote); see also: Ma hew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York, 2000); Leo Lucassen, “The Great War and the Origins of Migration Control in Western Europe and the United States (1880–1920),” in Regulation of Migration: International Experiences, ed. A. Böcker, K. Groenendijk, T. Havinga, and P. Minderhoud (Amsterdam, 1998), 45–72; Gérard Noiriel, Die Tyrannei des Nationalen: Sozialgeschichte des Asylrechts in Europa (Lüneburg, Germany, 1994); Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA, 1992). 3. McKeown, Melancholy Order; Bernard Harris, “Pro-Alienism, Anti-Alienism and the Medical Profession in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain,” in Race, Science and Medicine, 1700–1960, ed. W. Ernst and B. Harris (London, 1999), 189–217. 4. Zolberg, “Global Movements,” 280. 5. McKeown, Melancholy Order, 3 6. Akira Iriye, “The Internationalization of History,” American Historical Review 94, no. 1 (1989): 1–10; Zolberg, A Nation by Design. 7. Donna Gabaccia, “Juggling Jargons: ‘Italians Everywhere’, Diaspora or Transnationalism?” Traverse: Zeitschri für Geschichte 12, no. 1 (2005): 54. 8. Gerd Korman, “When Heredity Met the Bacterium: Quarantines in New York and Danzig, 1898–1921,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 46 (2001): 256; Alexandra M. Stern and Howard Markel, “International Efforts to Control

Germs of Anarchy, Crime, Disease, and Degeneracy • 41

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

Infectious Diseases, 1851 to the Present,” Journal of American Medical Association 292, no. 12 (2004): 1474–9. McKeown, Melancholy Order, 5; Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues. The imperial aspirations partly also had an effect on the modern (medicalized) imagination of the nation in Europe and the United States as several historians have shown: David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840–1914 (New Haven, CT, 1994), 275; Lüthi, Invading Bodies. Bernard Harris, “Anti-Alienism, Health and Social Reform in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain,” Pa erns of Prejudice 31, no. 4 (1997): 3, and Vivian D. Lipman, A History of the Jews in Britain since 1858 (Leicester, UK, 1990), 43–50; Trude Maurer, “Medizinalpolizei und Antisemitismus: Die deutsche Politik der Grenzsperre gegen Ostjuden im Ersten Weltkrieg,” Jahrbücher der Geschichte Osteuropas 33 (1985): 205–30. Klier, “Emigration Mania in Late-Imperial Russia.” Alfred C. Reed, “The Medical Side of Immigration,” Popular Science Monthly 80 (1912): 390–2; Alfred C. Reed, “Immigration and the Public Health,” Popular Science Monthly 83, no. 4 (1913): 313–38. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Pa erns of American Nativism 1860–1925 (New York, 1972); Klaus Hödl, Gesunde Juden, Kranke Schwarze: Körperbilder im medizinischen Diskurs (Innsbruck, Austria, 2002), 198, 207. Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in “Race,” Culture and Difference, ed. J. Donald and A. Ra ansi (London, 1992), 252–9; for articles in popular journals referring to Jews, see Herbert Adams Gibbons, “The Jewish Problem: Its Relation to American Ideals and Interests,” The Century, September 1921: 785–92; Redcliffe N. Salaman, “Some Notes on the Jewish Problem,” Eugenics in Race and State, vol. 2 (Scientific Papers of the Second International Congress of Eugenics 1921): 134–53; and Arnold White, “The Jewish Question,” The North American Review 178, no. 1 (1904): 10–24; for examples in psychiatry, see Abraham A. Brill, “The Adjustment of the Jew to the American Environment,” Mental Hygiene 2, no. 2 (1918): 219–31; Abraham Myerson, “The ‘Nervousness’ of the Jew,” Mental Hygiene 4, no. 1 (1920): 65–72; Thomas W. Salmon, “The Relation of Immigration to the Prevalence of Insanity,” American Journal of Insanity 64 (1907–1908): 53–71; Poor Physique, 1905–1907, National Archives (herea er NA), Washington, DC, Record Group (herea er RG) 85 Entry 9, Box 30, file 51490/19. Alluding to economic and religious explanations for the rise of American anti-Semitism during the second half of the nineteenth century, Ma hew Frye Jacobson additionally reminds that discriminations against Jews always “drew upon a language and logic of race.” See Ma hew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 164. The association of typhus and bacterial illnesses—such as trachoma—with Jewish immigrants has been thoroughly documented by several authors: Evans, Death in Hamburg; Fairchild, Science at the Borders, 166–67; Lüthi, Invading Bodies, 296–348; Howard Markel, “‘The Eyes Have It’: Trachoma, the Perception of Disease, the United States Public Health Service, and the

42 • Barbara Lüthi

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

American Jewish Immigration Experience, 1897–1924,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74, no. 3 (2000): 525–60. See Lüthi, Invading Bodies, 196–247. J. G. Wilson, “A Study in Jewish Psychopathology,” Popular Science Monthly 82, no. 3 (1913): 265; see also Salmon, “The Relation of Immigration:” 53–71. Maurice Fishberg, Tuberculosis among the Jews (New York, 1908); Fairchild, Science at the Borders, 166; Poor Physique, fn. 17. Goldstein, Price of Whiteness, 108–12; Robert Singerman, “The Jew as Racial Alien: The Genetic Component of American Anti-Semitism,” in Anti-Semitism in American History, ed. D. Gerber (Urbana, IL, 1987), 103–28. Kenneth L. Roberts, Why Europe Leaves Home: A True Account of the Reasons which Cause Central Europeans to Overrun America (Indianapolis, IN, 1922); Burton J. Hendrick, “The Great Jewish Invasion,” McClure’s Magazine (January 1907): 302–7; Lothrop Stoddard, “The Pedigree of Judah,” The Forum (March 1926): 321–33. John M. Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in FinDe-Siècle Europe (New Haven, CT, 1994). Eric L. Goldstein, “Contesting the Categories: Jews and Government Racial Classification in the United States,” Jewish History 19 (2005): 79–107. Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison, WI, 1982); Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers. Sebastian Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Munich, 2006); Christoph Gradmann, “Bazillen, Krankheit und Krieg: Bakteriologie und politische Sprache im deutschen Kaiserreich,” Berichte zur Wissenscha sgeschichte 19 (1996): 81–94; Barbara De ke, Die asiatische Hydra: Die Cholera von 1830/31 in Berlin und den preussischen Provinzen Posen, Preussen und Schlesien (Berlin, 1995); Paul Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in eastern Europe, 1890–1945 (Oxford, 2000). Silvia Berger, Bakterien in Krieg und Frieden: Eine Geschichte der medizinischen Bakteriologie in Deutschland 1890–1933 (Gö ingen, Germany, 2009). E. H. Ackerknecht, “Anticontagionism between 1821–1867,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 22, no. 5 (1948): 562–93; Philipp Sarasin, Silvia Berger, Marianne Hänseler, and Myriam Spörri, “Bakteriologie und Moderne. Eine Einleitung,” in Bakteriologie und Moderne: Studien zur Biopolitik der Moderne 1870–1920, ed. P. Sarasin (Frankfurt am Main, 2007), 8–43. Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation, 153. Klaus J. Bade, “‘Preussengänger’ und ‘Abwehrpolitik’: Ausländerbeschäftigung, Ausländerpolitik und Ausländerkontrolle auf dem Arbeitsmarkt in Preussen vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 14 (1984): 91–162; Christiane Reinecke, “Governing Aliens in Times of Upheaval: Immigration Control and Modern State Practice in Early Twentieth-Century Britain, Compared with Prussia,” International Review of Social History 54 (2009): 39–65. Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation, 146–150. Quoted a er Jonas Pfau, “‘… besonders geeignete Träger und Verbreiter ansteckender Krankheiten’—Antisemitisches Migrationsregime und zioni-

Germs of Anarchy, Crime, Disease, and Degeneracy • 43

33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58.

stische Abwehr in Deutschland 1918,” in Der Einfluss des Zionismus auf Medizin und Gesundheitswesen, ed. H. Carisa-Petra (Frankfurt am Main, 2006), 55 (translated by B. Lüthi). Feldman, Englishmen and Jews, 269; Harris, “Anti-Alienism”; Sven Oliver Müller, “Recht und Rasse: Die Ethnisierung von Staatsangehörigkeit und Nationsvorstellungen in Grossbritannien im Ersten Weltkrieg,” Geschichte und Gesellscha 30 (2004): 379–403. Holmes, John Bull’s Island; Feldman, “Was the Nineteenth Century a Golden Age for Immigrants? The Changing Articulation of National, Local and Voluntary Controls,” in Migration Control in the North Atlantic World, 167–77. Harris, “Pro-Alienism,” 191–9. Feldman, Englishmen and Jews, 275, 286. Harris, “Pro-Alienism,” 203–8. Quoted a er Harris, “Anti-Alienism,” 6; John Banister, England under the Jews (London, 1901). Memoranda from Whelpley to the Secretary des Department of Commerce and Labor, 8 November 1905, NA RG 85, Entry 9, Box 748, file 52714, 3 Folder (Inspector J.D. Whelpley Abroad—European Continent, 1905–1906). Harris, “Anti-Alienism,” 6–10. Pfau, “besonders geeignete Träger,” 54–64; McKeown, Melancholy Order, 8–10. Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide, 17. Pfau, ”besonders geeignete Träger,” 55–57. Liisa H. Malkki, “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity Among Scholars and Refugees,” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1992): 24–44. Markel, “The Eyes Have It,” 542; Brinkmann, “‘Travelling with Ballin’.” Whelpley, “Control of Emigration in Europe”; Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide, 63. Brinkmann, “‘Travelling with Ballin’,” 466. Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace” (New York, 1994); Fairchild, Science at the Borders; Lüthi, Invading Bodies. Alfred C. Reed, “Going Through Ellis Island,” Popular Science Monthly 82, no. 1 (1913): 18. Fairchild, Science at the Borders. Howard Markel, When Germs Travel: Six Major Epidemics That Have Invaded America Since 1900 and the Fears They Have Unleashed (New York, 2004), 60–81. Markel, Quarantine!, 166–82. Brinkmann, “‘Travelling with Ballin’,” 462. Markel, When Germs Travel, 93. Antin, From Plotzk to Boston, 41–44. Brinkmann, “‘Travelling with Ballin’,” 470–8. Nicholas J. Evans, “Indirect Passage from Europe: Transmigration via the UK, 1836–1914,” Journal for Maritime Research, June 2001 (h p://www.jmr .nmm.ac.uk/server/show/conJmrArticle.28). Ibid.

44 • Barbara Lüthi

59. Feldman, Englishmen and Jews, 290; Lipman, A History of the Jews, 48. 60. Christiane Reinecke, Grenzen der Freizügkigkeit: Migrationskontrolle in Großbritannien und Deutschland, 1880–1930 (Munich, 2010), 55–60. 61. Reinecke, “Governing Aliens.” 62. Ibid., 42.

PART II

@

TRANSIT THROUGH SCANDINAVIA, GERMANY, AND BRITAIN

@2 IMMIGRANTS OR TRANSMIGRANTS? Eastern European Jews in Sweden, 1860–1914 Carl Henrik Carlsson

One Family of Many In 1866, Josef Pagrotsky, a young Jewish man, arrived in Sweden. He had been born in the small shtetl of Raczki in the Suwalki Gubernia (province) of Russian Poland, near the border with East Prussia. He soon se led in the Swedish city Karlstad, about the same time as his sister Esther and her husband Nissen Felländer also se led there. Esther and Josef’s younger brothers, Ruben and David, soon joined them, while their sister Ada moved to London. Two of the Pagrotsky siblings, Mordechai Meier and Reizel, remained in the vicinity of Raczki. Each of the seven siblings married and had several children. Josef Pagrotsky and his brother-in-law were soon well integrated and established themselves as successful businessmen in Karlstad. Ruben and David, however, decided to take their families to Chicago in 1888. Ruben remained in Chicago for the rest of his life, while David and his family moved back to Sweden a er only two years. About the same time, in the 1880s, another generation of the Pagrotsky family had grown up in Poland: the fi een children of Mordechai Meier and Reizel. With only two exceptions, all of them emigrated. By this time, however, rather than moving to Sweden where they had relatives well integrated in that country’s society, all the children in this generation went to the United States, as did Reizel and her husband.1 The various migrations of the Pagrotsky family members may serve as a useful introduction to this study. In the 1860s and 1870s, Sweden was the main destination for young Pagrotsky family members leaving their Polish shtetl. In the 1880s, some of them le Sweden for the United States and thus became transmigrants. When members of the following Pagrotsky generation le Poland in the 1880s and 1890s, no one chose Sweden and all opted for the United States. This essay examines not just migration from one country to another, but also discusses the

48 • Carl Henrik Carlsson

question of why migrants move to and se le in one destination and then—a er a period ranging from a few weeks to several years—move to another place, a process defined as transmigration. Sweden was not located along the major migration routes of nineteenth-century Europe, and was of course never a major destination for migrants from eastern Europe. Among the more than two million Jews who le eastern Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century and prior to World War I, only about three to four thousand se led in Sweden. Still, these immigrants and their descendants made a significant impact not only on Jewish life in Sweden, but also on Swedish society. The memory of an unintended but permanent stopover is familiar among Swedish Jewish families. A migrant intended to go to the United States, but for some reason, such as the lack of money, did not get farther than Sweden. For many migrants, Sweden was a temporary destination on the way to the goldene medine (golden land) in America. While many migrants indeed went to the United States—or other western countries—a er spending some time in Sweden (like Ruben Pagrotsky), others, such as Josef Pagrotsky and his sister Esther, remained in Sweden. A lack of diaries, le ers, or even wri en memoirs of those immigrants makes it difficult to establish the exact reasons why migrants chose one option over another. The available source material, however, allows us to estimate how many of the eastern Europeans coming to Sweden were immigrants and how many became transmigrants. This essay seeks to explore two closely related questions: Should Jewish migration to Sweden during this period be considered mainly as immigration or as transmigration? Was Sweden primarily chosen as destination or as a convenient transit country? These questions are vital to an understanding of Swedish Jewish history and the demographic continuity of the Jewish population. Jews have se led in Sweden in waves since the late eighteenth century. A study of Jewish immigration to Sweden is of interest both in a Swedish and an international context. In fact, Sweden is well suited for a closer analysis of migration processes. The number of Jewish immigrants was relatively small, making it possible to conduct microlevel studies of the entire Jewish population. The availability of good primary source material, like the unique husförhörslängder (household examination records) and församlingsböcker (Swedish parish records), makes the study of Jewish history in the Swedish context a fruitful enterprise. The husförhörslängder are particularly useful: across Sweden, clergy—or rabbis—collected and annually updated information on all the inhabitants living in their parish or community. These records o en contain a wealth of information about the persons living in a specific

Immigrants or Transmigrants? • 49

household. A er 1894, the husförhörslängder were replaced by the församlingsböcker, which contain the same kind of information on individual parishioners.

Jewish Settlement in Sweden Jews were allowed to se le in Sweden and practice their religion from the 1770s. The Judereglemente (Jewish ordinance) of 1782 gave Jews permission to live only in the cities of Stockholm, Göteborg (Gothenburg), and Norrköping. In the same year, they were admi ed to Karlskrona as well. The Judereglemente was abolished in 1838, and the next decades can be described as the emancipation phase. In 1854, Swedishborn Jews were allowed to live in all Swedish cities; in 1860, all Jews who were Swedish citizens, regardless of birthplace, were permi ed to live anywhere in Sweden; and in 1873, all domicile restrictions for Jews without Swedish citizenship were abolished.2 Sweden’s Jewish population has always been relatively small (see table 2.1). In 1850, fewer than one thousand Jews lived in Sweden, with most in Stockholm and Gothenburg, and a few in Norrköping and Karlskrona. A majority of these Jews were of German origin; many of them soon rose to important positions in the economic and cultural spheres of Swedish society. During the emancipation process, the Jewish communities in Sweden also witnessed a religious transformation. Orthodox Judaism gradually gave way to moderate Reform Judaism. In 1870, Stockholm’s new synagogue was inaugurated. In the same year Jews received almost equal rights in Swedish society.3 Table 2.1. Number of Jews Living in Sweden, 1850–1920 Year

Number

Percentage of the total Swedish population

1850 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920

960 1,155 1,836 2,993 3,402 3,912 6,112 6,469

0.027 0.029 0.044 0.065 0.071 0.076 0.110 0.109

Source: Joseph Zitomersky, “The Jewish Population in Sweden 1780–1980. An EthnoDemographic Study,” Judiskt liv i Norden [Jewish life in the Nordic countries], ed. Gunnar Broberg, Harald Runblom, and Ma ias Tydén (Uppsala, 1988), 122.

50 • Carl Henrik Carlsson

Just as Jews in Sweden were being fully emancipated and had gained social acceptance, increasing immigration from czarist Russia challenged their status. The old established Jewish communities were ambivalent about the new strangers. Their a itude can be compared to Jewish communities in the German states, Britain, and the United States, where eastern European immigrants also were not received with open arms. Those communities considered eastern European Jews to be overly religious, poor, dirty, and dishonest. More important, the established Jews feared other Swedes would lump them together with the unwelcome strangers. Apart from accusing the newcomers of strengthening anti-Semitic stereotypes, new Jewish migrants were also blamed for exhausting the coffers of Jewish communities’ poor relief funds. Since Sweden’s Jewish community was small, it was widely feared that Orthodox immigrants would outnumber the earlier se led Swedish Jews within a few years and completely change the social and religious profile of the Jewish community. Tellingly, the two largest Jewish communities in Sweden, in Stockholm and Gothenburg, disenfranchised the newcomers in 1882 and 1883. Only Swedish citizens could become full members of the respective community.4 Before 1860, every person needed a passport to enter Sweden, but between 1860 and 1917 immigration to Sweden was largely unregulated and no special permits or visas were required for entry. The abolition of the pass regulation in 1860, therefore, was of great importance for Jewish (and other) migrants. There were no border controls, and anyone could travel to Sweden, se le and work. In 1862, the Jewish community of Stockholm warned the Swedish authorities the new law might boost unwelcome Jewish immigration from eastern Europe. Community leaders pleaded with the government to prevent this immigration at all costs.5

Jewish Immigration from Czarist Russia The overwhelming majority of Jewish migrants from eastern Europe to Sweden hailed from czarist Russia, including Russian Poland and Finland. Only a few Jews from Galicia and even fewer from Romania have been identified in the Swedish sources. It is difficult to establish exact figures of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. Immigration statistics are available from 1875, but these are of limited use because the officials did not differentiate between Jews and Christians. Since Russia included the Grand Duchy of Finland, it is not possible to extrapolate the few Jewish migrants from the extensive immigration

Immigrants or Transmigrants? • 51

of Christians from Finland to Sweden. A relatively simple way to assess the development and scale of the Jewish immigration from eastern Europe is to analyze population changes between 1851 and 1920. The number of Jews rose rather quickly during this period (see table 2.2). An important factor behind this increase was the immigration of Jews from the Russian Empire. During the 1860s, 1870s, and in the decade between 1901 and 1910 the Jewish popTable 2.2. Percent Increase of ulation increase exceeded 50 percent. Jews Living in Sweden, 1851–1920 This raises the question of how much Increase (percent) immigration contributed to this sig- Years 20 nificant growth. The early years of 1851–1860 59 the twentieth century witnessed es- 1861–1870 1871–1880 63 pecially high rates of emigration of 1881–1890 14 Jews from the Russian Empire. More 15 surprising is the increase during the 1891–1900 1901–1910 56 1860s and the 1870s. 1911–1920

6

It is fruitful to compare Sweden to Source: Derivation from table 2.1. New York, at that time the city with the largest number of Jewish immigrants. The increase of the population differed considerably. The share of the immigrants who se led in Sweden compared to New York was much larger in the beginning than at the end of the period. The Jewish population in Sweden, as a share of the New York Jewish population, was 3.1 percent in 1870, and 3.7 percent in 1880, but only 0.4 percent in 1920 (see table 2.3). Even if the comparison is based on very different population sizes—a huge Jewish population in New York and a very small one in Sweden—it is obvious that the chronological pa ern of the migration to Sweden differed from the United States and other destination countries such as Britain.6 Table 2.3. Jews Living in Sweden Compared to New York, 1870–1920

Year

Sweden, Number

New York, Number (estimated)

1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920

1,836 2,993 3,402 3,912 6,112 6,449

60,000 80,000 225,000 580,000 1,100,000 1,643,000

Jews in Sweden as a share of New York’s Jewish population (percent)

3.1 3.7 1.5 0.7 0.5 0.4

Source: For Sweden, see table 2.1. For New York, see Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem, 1971) 12, 1078.

52 • Carl Henrik Carlsson

All of these statistics are based on aggregated data. We know the net number of Jews living in Sweden in a specific year, but li le or nothing about their background. To learn more about Jews from czarist Russia, I examined additional empirical data. For this purpose, I created a database that locates every Jew living officially in Sweden on 31 December 1880. According to the official statistics, 2,993 Jews lived in Sweden on that day. Since the distribution of the Jews down to city and parish levels is available through detailed remarks in the official statistics, it has been possible to locate every Jew in the folkräkning (census) of 1880. This database can serve as an empirical base to answer a number of questions. For instance, it has been possible to establish the exact place of birth of almost every person by combining the folkräkning of 1880 with various other sources: church records, Jewish community files, applications for citizenship, and many other sources. The results are noteworthy. About 40 percent of all Jews older than fi een years (e.g., born before 1865) were born in Sweden, but an impressive 60 percent were born abroad: about 10 percent in Germany, and 5 percent in Denmark. But about 40 percent—a surprisingly high share—were born in the Russian Empire, including Russian Poland (see table 2.4). Table 2.4. Birth Countries of Adult Jews (Born before 1865) Officially Living in Sweden, 31 December 1880 Birth Country

Sweden Denmark Germany Russia a Russian Poland Other b Not Known TOTAL

Number

Percentage

776 89 189 112 615 39 40 1,860

41.7 4.8 10.2 6.0 33.1 2.1 2.2 100.0

Source: Database created by the author, in the author’s possession. a. Includes three persons born in Finland. b. Norway 2, The Netherlands 2, France 2, Austria (including Hungary and Galicia) 14, United States 8, Britain 8, and Peru 3.

This indicates that the immigration from eastern Europe to Sweden had started early. An analysis of the birthplaces indicates that at least until 1880 most Russian Jews originated in one rather small area: the Suwalki Gubernia, near the border with East Prussia (see table 2.5). The Pagrotskys mentioned at the start of this essay were only one of many families with roots there.

Immigrants or Transmigrants? • 53

Table 2.5. Birth Gubernias of All Jews Born before 1865 in the Russian Empire and Officially Living in Sweden, 31 December 1880 Birth Gubernias

Number

Percentage

Suwalki Gubernia, Russian Poland Lomza Gubernia, Russian Poland Kovno Gubernia, Russia Other Gubernias Total

472 17 57 47 593

79.6 2.9 9.6 7.9 100.0

Unknown or unidentified birthplaces within the Russian Empire Grand Total

134 727

Source: Database created by the author, in the author’s possession. Note: The nonresponse group is 134 out of 727, or 18.4 percent.

The data indicate that Jewish immigration to Sweden before 1880 was largely the result of chain migration, at least until 1880, which is, of course, a common migration phenomenon. Moreover, Jews from Suwalki were among the first to leave the Russian Empire for Britain, France, and the United States.7 About 30 percent of all Russian or Polish Jews who traveled from Hamburg to New York through a transit port (most o en in Britain) between 1855 and 1873 hailed primarily from the Suwalki Gubernia or the neighboring Lomza Gubernia.8 An investigation of Jewish immigration to France between 1860 and 1870 reveals a similar picture: about 30 to 50 percent of the immigrants came from the two Gubernias mentioned.9 Still, the figures regarding Sweden are noteworthy. Of all eastern European Jews older than fi een years living in Sweden in 1880, about 80 percent had been born in the Suwalki Gubernia. Of those not born in Suwalki, a majority was born in adjacent provinces, such as the Lomza and Kovno Gubernias. The prevalence of chain migration also refutes the popular misconception of the pogroms being the main reason behind the migration to Sweden. No pogroms occurred in the Suwalki, Lomza, and Kovno Gubernias in the early 1880s. Besides, the bulk of the migration to Sweden took place before the first wave of pogroms in southern Russia in 1881. To understand the reasons for the immigration to Sweden—at least before 1880—we need to focus on specific push factors in the Suwalki Gubernia. These are, notably, the proximity to east Prussia, changing economic conditions, an improving infrastructure for travel, the Russian suppression of the 1863 Polish uprising and— probably most important—the 1868–1869 famine, which halted the growth and economic process in Suwalki Gubernia and the adjacent

54 • Carl Henrik Carlsson

Kovno Gubernia. Most Jewish communities were affected by starvation and disease. Hundreds of Jews crossed the nearby border to east Prussia, overwhelming the existing Jewish community support networks in the small border towns and even in Königsberg and Memel. The editor of the German Jewish Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, Ludwig Philippson, raised funds for the East Prussian communities and organized a support network. A few hundred Jews from Suwalki and Kovno Gubernias were sent to the United States, while most others returned home a er receiving support. Smaller groups, however, migrated to other European countries, including Sweden. This migration continued into the 1870s and 1880s.10 Although there is a lack of micro studies on the pa erns and motivations for eastern European Jewish emigration, the available data indicate that Sweden was an important destination (and point of passage) for Jewish migrants who le Suwalki and Kovno Gubernias before 1880.

Sweden: Destination or Stopover? In the 1880s it became much easier for relatively poor Europeans to travel across the Atlantic. Larger and safer ships made the crossing much faster, and ticket prices declined. Did this also affect those Jewish migrants who were already residing in Sweden for several years? This leads back to the main question: was Sweden primarily a final destination, or just a point of passage for Jews going from eastern Europe to the United States? I will focus on the decade of 1880s, which is of great interest for many reasons. The year 1881 is still widely regarded as the starting point of the Jewish mass migration from eastern Europe. Interestingly, the growth of Sweden’s Jewish population during this decade was rather limited. The number grew from 2,993 in 1880 to 3,402 in 1890, a growth of only 14 percent (see tables 2.1 and 2.2). One reason could be that the number of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe decreased and that some Jews from eastern Europe who had se led in Sweden le for the United States and other countries. In this context, the total ban on peddling by foreign citizens in 1887 is of specific interest. To answer the question whether Sweden was primarily a country of transit or destination for Jews from eastern Europe, I examined the movement of 519 Jews born between 1841 and 1860 in the Russian Empire (including Finland and Russian Poland), who resided officially in Sweden on 31 December 1880. What happened to those Jews during the next ten years? Where were they living on 31 December 1890? How many were still living in Sweden? How many had moved to the United

Immigrants or Transmigrants? • 55

States? And how many were living in other Scandinavian countries or in other western European countries? Most of the 519 individuals could be traced. Swedish archives contain very useful sources for such research. Until 1910 the membership records of formal Jewish communities were recognized as the official national registration. Many Jews who were not Swedish citizens, however, did not belong to a formal Jewish community. They were registered in the Swedish Lutheran parishes despite their faith. The above-mentioned parish registers, the husförhörslängder (and from 1895 the församlingsböcker) are especially valuable sources in this regard. They were arranged geographically and cover a period of several years, o en five or ten. Members of a family are grouped together with information on names, birth dates, birthplaces, and even special events in a family. It was recorded when and from where families or individuals moved into a certain parish, and when and where they moved from there, whether they married, and when they died. The city authorities of Stockholm also kept civil records, filed in Rotemansarkivet (Rote’s archive), from 1878 to 1926. Most of these records are now digitized and available online.11 Thanks to those parish registers and the civil registration of Stockholm, it is possible to trace a person’s movement from the cradle (or the time of immigration) to the grave (or the time of emigration). I also consulted other Swedish sources such as the population databases of 1890 and 1900, and data from the parish registers.12 Particularly useful is the CD-ROM Emigranten populär (Swedish Emigration Records) that comprises several databases for the period from 1783 to 1951. The most extensive, Emihamn, covers about 1.4 million emigrants who moved to North America and other places. Most (slightly more than 1.1 million) departed from the port of Gothenburg between 1869 and 1951; smaller groups boarded ships in the ports of Malmö, Stockholm, Norrköping, Kalmar, Helsingborg, Copenhagen, and Hamburg.13 I have also used the 1900 census of the United States, which is available and indexed online, as well as many indexed databases of passenger lists, especially the Castle Garden Passenger Lists.14 Of the 519 people in the population, about two-thirds were still living in Sweden in 1890. Only 89, or about 17 percent, could be traced as emigrants to the United States (see table 2.6). Sixty-three individuals (12.1 percent of the population) could not be traced for the year 1890. Twenty-five of them were regarded in the Swedish records as obefintliga (nonexistant or absent), meaning they had disappeared without proper registration with the parish. The rest— thirty-eight individuals—were either lost during the research process, or in many cases were simply not registered in the Swedish church records, despite the fact they had been living in Sweden on 31 Decem-

56 • Carl Henrik Carlsson

Table 2.6. The Fate of Eastern European Jews in Sweden between 1881 and 1890, Excluding Estimated Distribution of the Nonresponse Group Between 1881 and 1890

Still living in Sweden in 1890 Died in Sweden before 1890 Emigrated to the United States Emigrated to other countries a Nonresponse Total

Number

Percentage

330 12 89 25 63 519

63.6 2.3 17.1 4.8 12.1 100.0

Source: Database created by the author, in the author’s possession. Note: Population = All Jews living in Sweden 31 December 1880, according to official records, born between 1841 and 1860 in the Russian Empire. a. Norway 11, Germany 6, Poland 3, Africa 3, Britain 1, Denmark 1.

ber 1880. Nevertheless, this number does not skew the actual result significantly. Of course, we must consider that the nonrespondents are a nonrandom sample of the total population. To a ain more exact and reliable data it is necessary to estimate the distribution of this nonresponse group. First, I estimated that five individuals of the 1880 population were still living in Sweden in 1890. It is not likely there were any more, or they would have been found in the census of 1890 or in other sources. I also estimated that four had died in Sweden prior to 1891, twentynine of them emigrated to the United States, and twenty-five to other countries. The reason why I estimate that so many in the nonresponse group emigrated to countries other than the United States is that most emigrants to the United States are likely to be found either in the Swedish records of passengers leaving through Swedish ports (Emihamn), or in the Castle Garden records of people admi ed to New York. It is likely that a rather large part in this nonresponse group le Sweden by train or boat to Denmark, Norway, Germany, Britain, or other European countries. Some probably moved back to their hometowns in the Russian Empire. These individuals were not registered in any surviving ship manifests or similar records. Still, some in the nonresponse group might have emigrated to the United States, despite the fact they could not be traced. Their family names may have changed or not spelled correctly in the records or indexes. They also might have traveled to ports not covered by the databases used for this study. This means that about two-thirds (64.5 percent) of the 1880 population of foreign-born Jews was still living in Sweden in 1890. Only 3 percent died, around 23 percent moved to the United States, and fewer than 10 percent had moved to other countries. Is this result surprising? It might actually be

Immigrants or Transmigrants? • 57

a li le surprising that so many remained in Sweden and that fewer than 25 percent migrated to the United States.

The Ban on Peddling 1887 This essay cannot determine how long the average transmigrant in the 1880s stayed in Sweden before heading to the United States or other countries, but it is possible to ascertain when foreign-born Jews living in Sweden in 1880 actually le for another country. One might expect that the first years of the decade would be overrepresented, since it seems likely that there is a correlation between the length of stay in Sweden and the frequency of migration to other countries; if a person had lived for a longer period in Sweden, it would be less likely that he or she emigrated to the United States compared to if he or she just lived in Sweden for a short period. This hypothesis is verified by the empirical analysis (see table 2.7). Most were leaving Sweden in the first years of the decade. The exception is the year 1888, which most likely can be explained by the implementation of the 1887 peddling ban on foreigners in Sweden. It is likely, however, that the previous change in the law in 1879 was even Table 2.7. Eastern European Jews Officially Living in Sweden in 1880 Who Emigrated to the United States, 1876–1890 Year

1876–1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 Unknown Total

Number

9 13 17 9 5 2 3 5 13 6 1 6 89

Source: Database created by the author, in the author’s possession. Note: Population=All Jews living in Sweden 31 December 1880, according to official records. Nine persons were recorded to live in Sweden on 31 December 1880, despite the fact that they had already migrated to the United States.

58 • Carl Henrik Carlsson

more important, since it stated that a non-Swedish citizen needed special permission to practice peddling. In a previous study, I showed that only one of the forty-nine applications between 1880 and 1887 from eastern European Jews was actually approved. In other words, no eastern European Jew who was not a Swedish citizen could practice peddling legally a er 1879.15 The peddling ban of 1887 was a codification of practice. The ban, however, has been considered both by historians and by contemporary Jews as a kind of turning point and an important indication of increasing obstacles Eastern Jews faced in Sweden. Maybe the ban was the trigger for Ruben and David Pagrotsky to leave Sweden in 1888. Those Jews who had received Swedish citizenship were of course free to practice peddling, but eastern European Jews faced much discrimination when they applied for Swedish citizenship. This was apparent especially during the 1880s when only 54 of 256 citizenship applications from eastern European Jews were approved.16 It should be noted that 1888 witnessed an increase in emigration from Sweden in general. It is obvious that the 1887 ban pushed some Jews to leave Sweden, but still, the number of thirteen Jewish emigrants to the United States in 1888 is rather low. Interestingly, the Jewish population in four Swedish cities with a large—in a Swedish context—population of eastern European Jews declined significantly between 31 December 1887 and 31 December 1888. The combined Jewish population of Sundsvall, Karlstad, Lund, and Kalmar decreased from 561 to 453, which is a decrease of 108 individuals or about 20 percent.17 Most Jews who emigrated in 1888 probably arrived in Sweden a er 1880 and therefore are not included in the 1880 database.

Migrants Traveling Through Sweden As already mentioned, the 519 Jews in the 1880 population consisted of individuals domiciled in Sweden. We also know that some Jews used Sweden as a transit country, traveling through Sweden to Gothenburg or some other port, where they embarked on a ship for travel to the United States or other countries. Those individuals were never domiciled in Sweden, and they were never registered in church records, in civil records, or in records of the Jewish communities. It is possible to estimate their number. In the database Emihamn, which is based on records of the police chamber passenger lists of Gothenburg and other port cities, one of the fields that is filled in for every emigrant is församling. For those Jews born in eastern Europe who were domiciled in

Immigrants or Transmigrants? • 59

Sweden, Stockholm or Lund or whatever place they had been residing in was listed, but in many cases the field församling was filled in with Ryssland (Russia) or Polen (Poland). This indicates that they were domiciled in those countries, but for one or another reason had chosen a Swedish port for their travel across the Atlantic. In the 1880s, about one hundred Jews domiciled in Russia or Poland went through Swedish ports according to the database Emihamn (see table 2.8). This could be compared to the number of slightly more than one hundred Jews born between 1841 to 1860 in the Russian Empire domiciled in Sweden in 1880 who also emigrated to the United States in the 1880s as discussed above. One reason behind choosing a Swedish port, of course, could have been that the migrant had Swedish relatives who supported him or her during the transmigration process. One example is Rosa Pagrotsky, a daughter of Mordechai Meier, who emigrated from Russia to New York in 1891 through the port of Gothenburg. Most likely she stayed in Karlstad for a while with her uncles and aunts, although she was never registered in Swedish church records. Table 2.8. Jews Domiciled in Russia and Poland Who Emigrated through Gothenburg and Other Swedish ports, 1869–1914 Year

1869–1880 1881–1890 1891–1900 1901–1910 1911–1914

Number (estimated)

35 100 83 516 209

Source: Derivation from the database Emihamn, covering emigrants mainly from the Port of Gothenburg, 1869–1951. The database is included in Emigranten-Populär. CD-ROM produced by Emigrantregistret i Karlstad and Göteborgs-Emigranten i Göteborg (2006), also available online as “Swedish Emigration Records, 1783–1951” at h p://search.ancestry .com/search/db.aspx?dbid=1189. Note: Neither religion nor ethnicity is stated in the database. The estimation of how many of the Russians and so on that were Jews is based on their names. The numbers includes some people whose domicile was stated to be Riga, St. Petersburg, Livonia, and Estonia.

Conclusion During the nineteenth century Sweden had a small population and—at least in the beginning of the period in question—it was a rural economy with a small industrial sector. The Jewish population was almost insignificant before 1850, compared to Jewish communities in central and western Europe. When immigration from czarist Russia began in the

60 • Carl Henrik Carlsson

1850s, fewer than one thousand Jews lived in Sweden. Although many of the newcomers le Sweden a er some years, by 1910 the population had increased to more than six thousand, largely thanks to immigration from eastern Europe. The immigrants played an important role in the continued presence of Swedish Jewry, but should the Jewish movement to Sweden primarily be considered as immigration or as transmigration? Was Sweden the final destination for the immigrants or just a transit country? Sweden was not located along the major migration routes from eastern Europe to central and western Europe as well as the Americas. Only a small share of the more than two million Jews who le eastern Europe prior to World War I se led in Scandinavia. When it became more feasible for more Europeans, especially in eastern and southern Europe, to leave their country of origin during and a er the 1880s, the share of emigrants choosing Sweden became even smaller. How did this affect those Jews already living in Sweden coming from eastern Europe in the 1860s and 1870s? It is believed that many of them regarded Sweden only as a temporary destination, and intended to go to the United States when opportunities were more beneficial. To what extent did they fulfill their original dream of going to the goldene medine? Some migrants decided to cross the Atlantic a er a number of years in Sweden, thus becoming transmigrants. Nevertheless, for most eastern European Jews who actually migrated to Swedish ports, Sweden was primarily an immigration country, and to a smaller extent than might have been expected, a transmigration country. The micro-level study presented above traced all Jews living in Sweden in 1880 who had been born in the Russian Empire between 1841 and 1860 through Swedish parish registers and several other sources. The analysis reveals that about 20 to 25 percent (slightly more than one hundred individuals) moved to the United States prior to 1891, and that about two-thirds of those (about 335 individuals) still resided in Sweden in 1890. This result might be surprising, not only because of the be er opportunities to move to the United States, but also because of the restrictions foreign Jews faced in Sweden, from the laws banning peddling to the difficulties of obtaining Swedish citizenship. One reason might be that many Jewish immigrants in Sweden belonged to migrant networks. The immigration to Sweden started early and was to a large extent a chain migration, especially from the Suwalki Gubernia in Russian Poland. Although not studied in detail, there are reasons to believe that the transmigrants in general were less economically well off than those who stayed. The essay has also shown that at least until the turn of the century, only few Russians and Poles seem to have used Gothen-

Immigrants or Transmigrants? • 61

burg or other Swedish ports on their way to America. Further research needs to explore why most eastern Europeans, especially from the Eastern Baltic region, bypassed Sweden on their way to America.

Notes 1. The information about the Pagrotsky family is taken from Carl Henrik Carlsson, “Släkten Pagrotsky i Polen, USA och Sverige” [The Pagrotsky family in Poland, USA and Sweden]. It can be found in Släktforskarnas årsbok ´06 [The yearbook for Swedish genealogists 2006] (Stockholm, 2006). I am using the Swedish spelling of the family name. In the United States, the spelling Pogrotsky was also used, and in Polish documents, the spellings Pagrodzki or Pogrucki were used. 2. Hugo Valentin, Judarnas historia i Sverige [The history of the Jews in Sweden] (Stockholm, 1924), 421–23, 444–6; Carl Henrik Carlsson, “Judisk invandring från Aaron Isaac till idag” [Jewish immigration from Aaron Isaac until today], in Judarna i Sverige—en minoritets historia. Fyra föreläsningar [The Jews in Sweden—the history of a minority. Four lectures], ed. H. Müssener (Uppsala, Sweden, 2011), 23, 29. 3. Hugo Valentin, Judarna i Sverige [The Jews in Sweden] (Stockholm, 1964, reprinted 2004), 98–109. 4. Valentin, Judarnas historia i Sverige, 482–4; Carlsson, Medborgarskap och diskriminering, 256. 5. Anna Besserman, “‘… E ersom nu en gång en nådig försyn täckts hosta dem upp på Sveriges gästvänliga stränder’: Mosaiska församlingen i Stockholm inför den östjudiska invandringen till staden 1860–1914” [“… Since a merciful providence pleases to throw them up onto the welcoming beaches of Sweden”: The Jewish community of Stockholm and the eastern European Jewish immigration, 1860–1914], Nordisk Judaistik 5, no. 2 (1984): 24; Carlsson, Medborgarskap och diskriminering, 263. 6. For Britain, see Gartner, Jewish Immigrant, 283. 7. See, e.g., “The Emigration from Suwalk,” Landsmen. Quarterly Publication of the Suwalk-Lomza Interest Group for Jewish Genealogists 1, no. 2 (1991): no page no. (for location information about Landsmen see h p://www.jewishgen .org/suwalklomza/Contents.html; the original article was published in Yiddish in Yizkor Bukh Suvalk [Memorial book of Suwalk], ed. B. Kahan (New York, 1961), 48–60. 8. Geraldine Moser and Marlene Silverman, “Hamburg Passengers from the Kingdom of Poland and the Russian Empire. Indirect Passage to New York, 1855–June 1873,” Landsmen. Quarterly Publication of the Suwalk-Lomza Interest Group for Jewish Genealogists 6, no. 4 (1996): ix. 9. Gerard Abramovici, “Paris Marriages Revisted, Part I,” Landsmen. Quarterly Publication of the Suwalk-Lomza Interest Group for Jewish Genealogists 9, no. 4 (1999): 21–40.

62 • Carl Henrik Carlsson

10. On the 1869–1869 famine and its impact on the emigration from Suwalki, see Wischnitzer, To Dwell in Safety, 28–32; Tobias Brinkmann, “Managing Mass Migration. Jewish Philanthropic Organizations and Jewish Mass Migration from Eastern Europe, 1868/1869–1914,” LeidschriĞ 22 (2007): 76–77; David L. Langenberg, “The Kovno Conference in 1869,” Landsmen. Quarterly Publication of the Suwalk-Lomza Interest Group for Jewish Genealogists 5, no. 2–3 (1995): 20–22; the original article by Grigori Aronson was published in Lite: Bukh Ayns [Lithuania: First Book] (New York, 1951). 11. For the Stockholm rotemansarkivet records, see h p://www2.ssa.stockholm .se/Rotemansarkivet/Search.aspx. 12. Sveriges Befolkning 1890 [Swedish census 1890]; CD-ROM produced by SVAR/Riksarkivet and Sveriges Släktforskarförbund (2003); Sveriges Befolkning 1900 [Swedish census 1900]; CD-ROM produced by SVAR/Riksarkivet and Sveriges Släktforskarförbund (2006). Both databases are also available online at www.svar.ra.se. These databases do not state the religion or ethnicity of the individuals, but can be combined with the author’s database of all Jews living in Sweden in 1880. 13. Emigranten Populär. CD-ROM produced by Emigrantregistret i Karlstad and Göteborgs-Emigranten i Göteborg (2006). This database is also available online under the heading Swedish Emigration Records, 1783–1951, h p:// search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=1189. 14. Most transatlantic passenger lists and the Castle Garden records are now searchable through www.ancestry.com and www.stevenmorse.org. Castle Garden served as the New York immigration port until April 1890, and Barge Island on Southeast Manha an between 19 April 1890 to 31 December 1891 before Ellis Island opened 1 January 1892. 15. Carlsson, Medborgarskap och diskriminering, 138. 16. Ibid.; for the outcomes of the applications in the 1880s, see ibid., 345. 17. Ibid., 137–8 (fn. 448).

@3 EMIGRANT TRAINS Jewish Migration through Prussia and American Remote Control, 1880–1914 Nicole Kvale Eilers

On the morning of 5 October 1910, a train arrived in the German port city of Bremen at 8:54 ..1 Although dozens of trains would stop at Bremen’s main train station that Wednesday, this particular train differed from most others. This train included four special locked cars that contained 129 eastern European emigrants, many of whom were Russian Jews. Because of their special status as eastern European Durchwanderer (transmigrants), these passengers had been segregated from other passengers since the Russian border. Each of these 129 people was more than just a passenger on another train to Bremen, and more than just an emigrant seeking a new life. Zale Rosenfeld, Wladislawo Sadoska, and Adolfine Lukowitz, along with their fellow passengers, each also constituted a threat and a bureaucratic burden. These travelers were singled out for special treatment due to their ethnicity and status as transmigrants. To Prussian administrators, each body aboard that train represented a potential carrier of germs and disease, and each person was considered a possible social parasite and potential financial drain on Germany. Yet to the large steamship lines, each of these Russian-Jewish emigrants represented profit, calculated into how many marks his or her transatlantic passage had cost, collectively equaling a large revenue stream arriving daily at the train station. At the turn of the century, the emigrant train was a site where conflicting agendas collided to create a distinctive migrant experience. The sealed emigrant trains were part of a larger system specifically created to segregate transmigrants from the general population in Germany. The Prussian administration and the two largest German steamship lines, the Hamburg-Amerikanische Paketfahrt Aktiengesellscha (HAPAG) and the Norddeutscher Lloyd (North German Lloyd; NDL), worked together to create a system that featured border inspection stations, medical exams, disinfection facilities, closed emigrant trains, spe-

64 • Nicole Kvale Eilers

cial lodging houses in the port cities, and additional health checks for Durchwanderer. The expressed goal of the system was to allow eastern European transmigrants to cross German territory en route to Hamburg and Bremen without permi ing them to enter and se le in Germany. At the same time, the system allowed German steamship lines to profit from the mass migration. Despite great effort and expense, the German migration transportation system was not completely successful in controlling transmigrants. Various state, private, and foreign interests pursued competing agendas regarding the transmigrants. These conflicting priorities influenced the development and continued efficacy of the transportation system for transmigration through Germany. The Prussian administration viewed the Durchwanderer as potentially diseased, dirty, and destitute, and therefore potentially as burdens on the German state. Their goal was to keep transmigrants from mingling with the population or se ling in the nation. The private German steamship companies cooperated with the Prussian administration in creating a system that nominally regulated transmigrants’ access to Germany in order to maximize the number of international travelers and therefore steamship companies’ profit. Transatlantic pressures were equally important in shaping this transportation system. The American state also excluded certain migrants, placing the financial and logistical burden of transporting undesirable migrants back across the Atlantic on the transatlantic carriers. Consequently the German steamship lines’ concern was to screen potential migrants before they boarded ships headed for American ports, ideally before they even crossed the German border. Thus, the emigrant trains illustrate the diverging agendas of the steamship lines, and of the Prussian and American governments. The inconsistencies within the unconventional arrangement of the trains offer a perspective on the organization of the transmigration, as well as on the effect that diverging state, public, and private agendas had on the efficacy of the overall system and the transmigrants’ experience. This essay will detail these special emigrant trains, and situate them within the greater context of the transportation system specifically created to control eastern European transmigration through Germany. The result of these differing agendas was a less-than-perfect system that did not completely prevent transmigrants from becoming immigrants in Germany. I also argue that transatlantic pressures played a crucial role in shaping the German migration transportation system. A growing literature focuses on this unique migration transportation system for transmigrants through Germany prior to World War I. Scholars, including Zosa Szajkowski, Michael Just, and Tobias Brink-

Emigrant Trains • 65

mann in particular, have laid the groundwork for our understanding of the overall system.2 Yet much of this research has focused on the control stations and the role of Jewish aid organizations. Scholars thus far have not thoroughly examined the functioning of the emigrant trains or assessed their effectiveness in fulfilling Prussia’s stated goals. This essay seeks to address this gap. For many migrants, the transit journey was a difficult experience. Their fear and pain was real, and firsthand accounts of their experiences confirm that the odyssey of traveling over the Prussian border, through a control station, on an emigrant train, and on to the port cities could be both frightening and disconcerting. For some, repeated health inspections brought much sorrow as a child or parent was denied permission to continue the journey. Likewise, the disinfection process served as a reminder that they were considered dirty, diseased, and suspect individuals. Nevertheless, transmigrants exercised more agency than scholars have recognized, and a closer examination of the emigrant trains provides an opportunity to reassess the entire transmigration system.

Attitudes toward Eastern European Transmigrants The late 1880s and early 1890s marked an important shi in numbers and composition of the migration traffic from eastern Europe through Germany, and an accompanying shi in a itude toward transmigrants. Between 1866 and 1870, only 22 percent of the migration through Bremen originated from outside Germany. Between 1896 and 1900, more than 85 percent of migrants came from beyond German borders. On the eve of World War I, more than 93 percent of the departing passengers were foreigners, with most coming from Russia and the AustroHungarian Empire.3 A large proportion of these emigrants were Jewish. Between 1881 and 1910, the share of Jewish immigrants from Russia constituted about 50 percent. In some years, as in 1891, almost all Russian migrants were Jewish.4 Officials in both Prussia and the United States were concerned about the rise of the transatlantic migration from eastern Europe. Contemporary prejudice conflated ethnicity with poverty and disease. The belief in a hierarchy of races had many adherents in both Germany and the United States. Many in those countries considered northern and western Europeans to be superior to eastern and southern Europeans. The creation of the emigrant train system occurred against the background of rising anti-Semitism and xenophobia in imperial Germany.

66 • Nicole Kvale Eilers

The Prussian administration was already engaged in an effort to assimilate Slavs and other resident minorities to German culture. Almost immediately a er the unification of Germany in 1871, Chancellor O o von Bismarck initiated a drive to Germanize minority populations. The goal of the campaign was to cause all people living within the country’s borders to become culturally and linguistically German. The growing streams of Durchwanderer, composed predominantly of Poles, Jews from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, Ruthenians, and other eastern Europeans, posed a threat to the newly unified country’s efforts at cultural, linguistic, and ethnic homogenization. The Prussian authorities feared that eastern Europeans, especially Jews, would se le in Germany, become a burden on local resources, increase unemployment, and spread disease.5 The United States also viewed the rising immigration of eastern and southern Europeans with suspicion. As in Germany, popular sentiment and scientific evidence led many to believe that the so-called old immigrants from western and central Europe were superior to the new immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, who were overwhelmingly not Protestants. To many observers, Italians, Poles, and Jews (as well as Chinese) seemed to pose a threat to the fabric of the nation. Many of those migrants were single and male, and were perceived as sojourners who refused to assimilate. Fear of labor competition, poverty, and disease fueled widespread opposition. American officials and the general public were concerned about the growing quantity and the supposedly questionable quality of the new immigration.6 The federal government’s decision to regulate immigration was a response to growing demands for control and even to a ban on those migrants who supposedly differed from earlier arrivals. The United States passed several immigration acts that prevented certain migrants from entering the country. The 1882 act excluded anyone “likely to become a public charge.”7 In the same year, the U.S. Congress suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers, for the first time excluding a specific national group. In 1891, all sick or diseased persons were prohibited from entering. Even before Ellis Island and other immigration stations went into operation in 1892 and the following years, American immigration inspectors refused admission to undesirable persons. The transatlantic (and transpacific) steamship lines were responsible for transporting these rejected migrants back to the port of embarkation.8 The American turn toward a more stringent handling of immigration, especially the policy of returning unwanted migrants, explains why the German authorities began more closely to regulate the transmigration of eastern Europeans.

Emigrant Trains • 67

Several health scares in 1892 seemed to confirm the prejudices and fears against Durchwanderer. In February, a typhus epidemic broke out on the Lower East Side of New York City. Public opinion and several medical experts quickly singled out eastern European Jewish immigrants as the culprits. The incident prompted the U.S. government to enact special measures that placed entering eastern European Jewish immigrants under quarantine. HAPAG and NDL, as well as Prussian border officials, a empted to limit entrance of transmigrants to Germany, knowing that they would not be allowed entrance to the United States and would therefore potentially stay in Germany.9 In August 1892, only a few months a er these special measures had been li ed, Hamburg experienced a devastating cholera epidemic that claimed more than eight thousand lives. Here, too, the epidemic and deaths were blamed on eastern European Jewish transmigrants—wrongly, as we know today.10 The United States reacted strongly to the Hamburg epidemic, particularly a er a few passengers infected with cholera entered New York on HAPAG vessels. By the end of August, the Bureau of Immigration demanded that all steerage passengers coming from Hamburg undergo quarantine and thorough inspection before being allowed to land. They specifically demanded the inspection and disinfection of all Jewish passengers. When HAPAG continued to send vessels carrying infected passengers, President Benjamin Harrison all but interrupted the transatlantic migration traffic. No vessel carrying immigrants from any European port would be allowed to land before completing a twentyday quarantine at the steamship lines’ expense. This order remained in effect until February 1893. HAPAG and NDL were hit hard by this decision. Keeping a ship in quarantine for three weeks was a huge financial burden: the cost was roughly $5,000 per ship, per day.11 As the New York Times put it, “In consequence of President Harrison’s circular relative to the quarantining of emigrants, … the Hamburg-American Packet Company [HAPAG] … has entirely stopped its steerage passenger business.”12 In part due to the American restrictions as well as concern for the health of German citizens, both the city of Hamburg and the state of Prussia closed their borders to Russian subjects who intended to travel to the United States in steerage. These measures were only partly successful, however, as hundreds of transmigrants continued to surreptitiously cross the border into Prussia and then travel on to the port cities.13 Because the United States, the primary destination point for most of the migrants, would not receive these passengers, they had to remain in Germany. This put an enormous burden on the Prussian state and local authorities along

68 • Nicole Kvale Eilers

the main transit routes. When the United States finally li ed the special quarantine restrictions in early 1893, Prussia continued its closed-border policy toward eastern European transmigrants, depriving HAPAG and NDL of a major source of income. In response, the two steamship lines lobbied for the creation of a more efficient control system that would satisfy the concerns of the Prussian (and American) state but also enable the steamship lines to profit from the Durchwanderung (transmigration). The chief executives of the two lines, Albert Ballin and Heinrich Wiegand, argued it would be more effective to reopen the Prussian border but control who crossed it. Finding a compromise between the interests of the Prussian authorities and those of HAPAG, NDL, and other interested parties was not easy. The steamship lines and the Berlin government reached an agreement in September 1894.14

Control Stations In 1894, the Prussian administration entered into cooperation with the private steamship companies to create an efficient transport system that would control the growing transmigration. The first line of defense against unwanted transmigrants consisted of the so-called control stations erected along the eastern Prussian border to contain unwanted migrants from Russia and Austria-Hungary. Forerunners of the border stations existed even before the 1892 cholera epidemic, but a concerted effort to systematically control the eastern European transmigrants began only in 1894. The control stations on the Prussian border with the Russian Empire performed sanitization and disinfection procedures, and carried out inspections of the migrants and their luggage. The first of these control stations were erected in 1894–1895 at Bajohren, Eydtkuhnen, Prostken, Illowo, and O lotschin, near the main rail crossings along the border. By 1905, additional control stations had been established at Tilsit, Insterburg, Posen, and Ostrowo. Each control station was located near a railway station, yet was isolated as much as possible from the general population.15 The location near the major railroad crossings allowed for a large volume of legal traffic from Russia, minimized contacts of emigrants with the local German population, and maximized the likelihood of capturing those illegally crossing the green border. As one German official noted, “If these control stations ceased to exist, then any and every emigrant could cross the German border, where and when he chose, and it would present a threat on sanitary, security, and pauper grounds, in case such people stayed in Ger-

Emigrant Trains • 69

many. Finally, there is also the cost of individual local administrations that must send them back to their homelands.”16 Apart from the control stations along the Russian frontier, so-called registration stations were established in Myslowitz and Ratibor in Upper Silesia, near the AustroHungarian border, and later at Oderberg and Leipzig. These stations performed more-limited inspections and no systematic disinfections.17 The newly created Central Administration of the Control Stations in Berlin, founded by HAPAG and NDL, managed the border control stations.18 Under the stipulations of the September 1894 agreement with the Prussian government, the two steamship lines were responsible for erecting, maintaining, and managing the stations. Any expenses incurred via the inspection, boarding, housing, or other treatment at the control stations, as well as any expenses for transportation or deportation, were covered by the steamship lines. HAPAG and NDL were thus responsible not only for those who had already booked a passage aboard HAPAG and NDL vessels, but also for all other migrants traveling through Germany. The border control stations focused largely on rendering the Russian transmigrants, presumed to be dirty and diseased, clean and healthy enough to continue toward the United States. At most stations, a physician paid particular a ention to eyes and scalps. Symptoms that suggested trachoma, favus, diphtheria, whooping cough, pneumonia, or another contagious disease were suspect, and usually led to a detention. This medical observation lasted five days. Those with treatable illnesses received care, and, if cured, were permi ed to continue their journey; those whom the authorities deemed health risks were denied entrance into Prussia and transported back to the nearby border. At the control stations, both migrants and their belongings were disinfected and cleansed. The migrants themselves funded the disinfection process; each paid 2 marks for this process and received a certificate asserting his or her health.19 The dated certificate, signed by the doctor, was perhaps the most important document the transmigrants held in allowing them to continue their journey. Finally, the transmigrants were loaded onto special sealed emigrant trains for transport to Ruhleben, an inland control station located on the western outskirts of Berlin, or directly to one of the ports. Depending on the location of the border station and the time of departure, the train ride to Ruhleben could take up to twenty-four hours.20 Strict health controls at the German ports and in the United States, in combination with Prussia’s tightened regulations for Russian emigrants traveling through Prussian territory a er the creation of the control stations, were advantageous for the migrants. Especially a er the

70 • Nicole Kvale Eilers

system became established and news of the strict health restrictions in place in Germany and the United States had spread across eastern Europe, migrants recognized that being inspected and cleared at the border was in their own interest. Only those with valid health certificates issued at a control station would be allowed to proceed.21 Furthermore, any Russian migrant found traveling loose in Prussia—officials sometimes referred to them as “rogue transmigrants”—had to show proof of sufficient funds for an eventual return journey, a valid passport, and possession of a ticket for cabin accommodations rather than steerage.22 The majority of migrants could not meet these strict requirements. Russians who evaded the control stations and were stopped while in transit through Prussia were sent back to Russia, returned to a control station on the border, or sent to Ruhleben for further inspection.23 The risk of losing valuable time and facing almost certain deportation convinced even those Russians who walked across the border some distance from a major railroad line to report voluntarily to the nearest control station. Thus, migrant agency played an important role in the efficacy of the system. Most Durchwanderer passed through Ruhleben en route to Bremen and Hamburg, or to ports in western Europe such as Ro erdam or Antwerp. Located a few miles west of Berlin, Ruhleben became a key collection point and secondary point of inspection and disinfection. Those who had gone to one of the border control stations were transported to Ruhleben in special, sealed emigrant trains. All Russians who had come across the Austrian border were also sent to Ruhleben for more-thorough inspections before being put on a train to Bremen or Hamburg.24 The Ruhleben station was usually crowded. One reporter captured both the bustling atmosphere and the prejudicial spirit that colored official and popular perceptions of eastern European migrants. He noted the presence of “the Russian and Polish Jews with their long, greasy Kaftans; the Ruthenian farmer with his long, inexpressively dirty sheepskin turned inside out with the wool on the inside, the women with long boots covering their naked legs, and country folk and workers from all over the far east, and children everywhere.”25 The reporter also described the wild gesticulations of everyone, “especially the Jews,” and how the entire platform was overflowing with bedding, boxes, and crates.26 Even less-condescending observers noted the crowding and bustle present at the station. At Ruhleben, the medical inspection and disinfection procedures were similar to those performed at the border stations. Mashke Antin, a Jewish teenage girl from Russia traveling through Ruhleben shortly a er the border had been reopened in 1894, poignantly captured her experience of Ruhleben in a memoir of the

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journey published in 1899. A er inspection, the emigrants went to a small waiting hall before continuing the journey to the port cities in sealed trains.27 The control stations at the border and Ruhleben were relatively effective in screening transmigrants and rejecting those considered undesirable. For example, between 1906 and 1907, nearly one hundred twenty-eight thousand passengers passed through the nine border stations between Russia and Germany, and almost three hundred ten thousand passed between the four stations along the Austro-German border and at Leipzig. During that time, 5.2 percent were rejected at the Russian stations, but only 1.6 percent were rejected along the Austro-Hungarian border.28 Nevertheless, each year several thousand ill or otherwise undesirable transmigrants circumvented the stations, went through undiagnosed, or became ill during the German transit. Each year, several hundred migrants were rejected at Ruhleben, and several thousand migrants who had not been inspected at all arrived annually at Ruhleben and the port cities.29 These numbers were relatively low, given the scale of the annual movement. But these cases were unse ling to authorities in Prussia, Hamburg, and Bremen because officials worried that even a few ill migrants could trigger a major epidemic. The emigrant trains proved even more problematic.

Emigrant Trains From the perspective of state officials, isolating transmigrants from the general population during their passage was as crucial as the screening procedures at the eastern border. According to the 1894 agreement, HAPAG and NDL agreed to use either special trains or separate wagons to transport the Durchwanderer to Ruhleben and then to the ports.30 Some emigrant trains were already in use during the late 1880s and early 1890s, but became mandatory a er September 1894.31 A er that date, potentially threatening Durchwanderer were not allowed to “roam free” or disembark under any circumstances, once they had entered the transit system, despite the fact that the journey to the ports o en lasted longer than twenty-four hours. In theory, isolation kept the transmigrants not only from contaminating the population, but also from slipping uninvited into Germany. The size of the trains varied, as did the frequency of service. In some cases, an entire train was reserved for only Durchwanderer. When that was not feasible, the emigrants were put onto separate (and sealed) wagons a ached to regular trains. Especially during the off-season

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or at less-busy control stations, emigrants sometimes had to wait for days at the ill-equipped control stations before they could continue their journey. Transports from Ruhleben, Ratibor, and Myslowitz to the ports were more regular, even during the winter. Special emigrant trains made routine trips from Ruhleben to Bremen. In 1909, for example, trains number 1354, 1352, and 270 brought transmigrants from Ruhleben to Bremen, and emigrant trains number 1390, 1410, and 1414 traveled from the control stations Ratibor and Myslowitz to Bremen. During that year, thirty-three emigrant trains transported 6,281 passengers from Ruhleben, and 251 emigrant trains took 58,200 passengers from Myslowitz and Ratibor to Bremen. Single emigrant wagons attached to scheduled trains also transported transmigrants from these stations to Bremen.32 Conditions on the emigrant trains were uniformly poor, to the point of being inhumane. The Prussian administration boasted that each car had toilet facilities and a radiator, but those amenities did not outweigh the dehumanizing aspects of the journey.33 Emigrant passengers described these trains as crowded with people and baggage, o en offering standing room only, and remembered them as hot, uncomfortable, and poorly ventilated. Mashke Antin recalled, There were only four narrow benches in the whole car, and about twice as many people were already seated on these as they were probably supposed to accommodate. All other space, to the last inch, was crowded by passengers or their luggage. It was very hot and close and altogether uncomfortable, and still at every new station fresh passengers came crowding in, and actually made room, spare as it was, for themselves.34

Another traveler, a reporter working for the Social Democrat daily Vorwärts, painted a vivid picture of his experience aboard an emigrant train from the Tilsit control station. He described his fellow passengers as a mix of Orthodox Russians, Roman Catholic Poles, and Jews. A variety of languages melded together to form a low and constant din. When it was time to sleep, everyone simply lay down where he or she could—next to one another, across one another, or on top of one another. Equally vivid were his descriptions of the smells that filled the train: the aroma of Russian tobacco mingled with the smells of Branntwein (brandy), herring, other foods, and human odors of the worst kind.35 Besides being transported like prisoners through Germany, the transmigrants were also o en le without proper food or drink. Those travelers who had not brought their own provisions had to rely on the goodwill and generosity of fellow travelers, or, in quite a few cases, on Jewish aid commi ees. Along the border, and at larger train stations such as Königsberg and Hanover, groups of Jewish men and women

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awaited the emigrant trains and passed bo les of milk, tea, fruit, and sandwiches through the windows—to Jews and non-Jews. Sammy Gronemann, a Jewish lawyer, who set up a support network at the Hanover train station in 1904, criticized the dehumanizing aspects of the system, especially the passengers’ lack of access to water.36 The emigrant trains took transmigrants from the eastern border via Ruhleben to Hamburg or Bremen, or to Dutch, Belgian, and French ports on the North Sea. In Hamburg and Bremen, the trains went directly to specific compounds, carefully chosen to minimize contact between emigrants and the local population. In Hamburg, the HAPAG Auswandererhallen (emigrant halls) accommodated most transmigrants. The facility was located several miles outside the city, on the southern edge of the port. The state-of-the-art Auswandererhallen opened its doors in 1902, replacing a primitive barrack complex at the Amerikaquai (America pier) in the port that dated back to the 1892 cholera outbreak. In Bremen, a special platform in the central train station was reserved for emigrant trains. By 1905, whenever possible the special trains delivered emigrants at 9:00 .., 10:30 ., and 11:30 .. to the Lloyd Gepäckhalle (baggage hall) at the Bremen train station where officials met them.37 Despite the clear mandate by the Prussian administration and the desire of the port cities to segregate potentially dangerous travelers, a closer look at the emigrant trains exposes loopholes. Transportation from the control stations to the port cities proved problematic. Although Prussia mandated that all Durchwanderer travel on special, closed emigrant trains or in sealed wagons a ached to regular trains, no single method of following that regulation existed. Carrying out the policy fell to NDL and HAPAG and, although the companies complied, it was not a primary objective. The two German steamship lines were each responsible for the costs of transporting migrants to the port cities. They were also responsible for those going via Germany to non-German ports such as Ro erdam and Antwerp. One week HAPAG paid for their transportation, and the next week NDL did, so that at the end of the year each company, on average, had paid for half of the transmigrants’ train transportation to foreign ports. The arrangement differed slightly from the control stations Ratibor and Myslowitz in Upper Silesia. Each company in those cases was responsible for paying for its own migrants, but NDL paid for the railroad transportation of those travelers from Ratibor to foreign ports, while HAPAG remained responsible for those from Myslowitz.38 The steamship lines depended on local railway lines to transport the migrants from the various control stations. Not surprisingly, indi-

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vidual railroad companies o en gave priority to their scheduled service. Railroad officials were willing to allocate special, isolated trains or wagons only a er a particular number of transmigrants had been reached. Other factors, such as the location of the control station or the season, also influenced the availability of trains for migrants. During the slower winter months, only twenty emigrant trains might travel weekly to Hamburg, but the number of trains increased in the spring and summer when emigrant traffic was greater.39 Not all emigrants who passed through a control station were put on sealed trains. For example, in 1909, 144,417 emigrants traveled through Bremen. Only 64,481 arrived on 284 special emigrant trains. Of the 79,936 who came on regular trains, only 70 percent had been placed in sealed extra wagons. Thus, almost twenty-four thousand emigrants traveled with regular trains. The statistics for 1907 through 1914 showed a similar proportion.40 Some of these emigrants were never subject to Prussian mandated control; only those emigrants originating in Russia or Austro-Hungary went through the control stations. Nevertheless, several thousand eastern European emigrants arrived unsupervised in Bremen each year, contrary to Prussian stipulations. The port cities of Bremen and Hamburg, both independent citystates within imperial Germany, presented perhaps the greatest threat to the Prussian administration’s goal of keeping the Durchwanderer separate from the German population. This was primarily due to the conflicting agendas of public and private interests. Bremen and Hamburg represented a destination, albeit a temporary one. Thousands of transmigrants arrived each day in those cities. The sheer numbers called for control, but officials in the port cities could hardly cope. Hamburg and Bremen could never fully isolate the Durchwanderer from the general population. Once the emigrant trains reached Bremen and Hamburg, the emigrants enjoyed varying degrees of freedom. In Hamburg, where special facilities existed to isolate transmigrants, the violation of Prussian demands appears particularly glaring. Emigrant trains did not regularly terminate at the Amerikaquai or Auswandererhallen, because HAPAG worked with different railroad companies. The Hamburg police reported that every regular train brought a handful of emigrants from Russia, Hungary, and Galicia. As early as December 1894, the police made the even more disturbing observation that “on almost every transport of emigrants there are several people that go missing, who simply ran off during transport.”41 These refugees presumably se led in Germany and became a potential burden to the state and a health risk for the population. The police urged the railway administration to transport all emigrants on closed trains directly to

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the Hamburg emigrant facilities and, if possible, to limit these special transports to two fixed times each day.42 The railway administration agreed to bring groups of twenty or more emigrants on special early trains that would terminate at the Auswandererhallen on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays.43 On Sundays and Mondays, however, the emigrants would have to disembark at the main train station in the city center and travel to the emigrant quarters on their own; the same system would apply to all a ernoon trains. The main police official at the Auswandererhallen, Kiliszewski, ever concerned about the safety of Hamburg, was not satisfied. He demanded that the railway administration take measures to ensure that Russian emigrants were not allowed to disembark alone at the downtown train station. Kiliszewski suggested the administration should run a daily, closely supervised service that would leave Ruhleben at 12:40 .. and reach Hamburg by 9:00 .. The railroads responded half-heartedly and continued to set limits on the steps they would take.44 Hamburg subsequently resorted to other policies to control rogue travelers. In February 1901, the Hamburg police reiterated its earlier complaint: “Each train that arrives in Hamburg brings emigrants with it. Those who travel in groups always travel fourth class, and are easy to spot.”45 Furthermore, the express trains also brought some emigrants to Hamburg “who can escape unnoticed into the city … Not only the trains originating from outside Germany bring emigrants to the city.”46 The police instructed the railroad personnel at the major Hamburg train stations to meet arriving trains and look for emigrants. To aid station officials with the daunting task of processing ninety-six trains arriving between 5:29 .. and 1:04 .. the following night, the Hamburg police assigned ten of their officers to work in two shi s.47 How long this vigilance continued and how effective it was in corralling “rogue transmigrants” is uncertain. Nevertheless, it is clear that Hamburg officials were unsatisfied with the emigrant train system and struggled to cope with the transmigrant traffic. Perhaps the largest impediment to a truly successful emigrant train system was cost. In Hamburg especially, the Senate (the city’s government), the railway administration, and HAPAG argued continuously over who had the ultimate financial responsibility for transporting emigrants on the special emigrant trains. In December 1911, for instance, the railway administration complained that the Hamburg Senate expected it to be responsible for transporting the emigrant trains to the docks. That would mean an extra tariff of 3 marks per emigrant wagon. The railway administration flatly refused to take on the cost, and HAPAG

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agreed that transmigrants would have to disembark at one of the centrally located train stations in the city.48 As a result, emigrants and transmigrants continued to roam within Hamburg at places other than the supervised emigrant facilities. In 1901, only 12,787 migrants went directly to the Hamburg Amerikaquai in the port; 40,532 arrived at a regular train station. In 1903, the situation improved somewhat: 46,738 went directly to the newly opened Auswandererhallen while 64,760 did not. Not all those stopping at regular stations were considered dangerous, but a large number were. Of the 107,433 emigrants who passed through Hamburg in 1904, 56,553 were of Russian origin. Only 49,117 of these had passed through a control station, while 7,436 had circumvented control stations. Out of the total number of emigrants, only 28,358 went directly by train to the Auswandererhallen, and 58,022 arrived at a regular train station. Even if all of the passengers that went directly to the emigrant facilities were Russian, more than twenty-eight thousand Russian emigrants disembarked in central Hamburg instead. Of course, in all likelihood the number of Russian—and therefore dangerous—migrants who arrived at a regular train station was even higher.49 These statistics are particularly revealing in light of the trouble Hamburg and HAPAG went through to segregate transmigrants once they had reached Hamburg. HAPAG opened special emigrant barracks in July 1892, just before the cholera epidemic devastated the city. Those barracks provided common rooms, dining halls, and lodging facilities for up to fourteen hundred emigrants. Initially, the migrants were allowed to leave the Amerikaquai facilities. A er the cholera epidemic struck in the summer of 1892, emigrant trains brought Durchwanderer directly to the Amerikaquai, where Russians were quarantined until their ships departed.50 In 1901, the city of Hamburg reclaimed the Amerikaquai for expansion of the harbor, thus necessitating the relocation and reconstruction of new facilities near HAPAG’s docks. Opened in 1902 several miles from the city center, the Auswandererhallen constituted a veritable emigrant village. This enclosed compound was purposefully created to segregate transmigrants at a safe distance from the rest of Hamburg’s population. Russian migrants, many of whom were Jewish, had separate living quarters. Kosher meals were available, and Jews could pray and a end services at a small synagogue. Many may have appreciated those amenities, but eastern European transmigrants also faced restrictions in the Auswandererhallen: Russian emigrants were not allowed to leave the compound.51 Nevertheless, the Auswandererhallen represented an improvement over the o en substandard and overpriced accommodations available to transmigrants in central Hamburg prior to its construction.

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Bremen’s approach to controlling the Durchwanderer was more lax than Hamburg’s. The emigrant trains arrived at a special platform at the main train station. Besides the regular steerage and fourth-class waiting areas, the station had a special waiting room for emigrants located in one wing, but transmigrants were not as systematically segregated as in Hamburg. Officials from the Bremen Office of Emigrant Affairs helped direct the arriving transmigrants to affordable lodging in the city center. A er a renewed cholera scare in 1905, the Bremen health office demanded transmigrants should be taken to their quarters in groups. Whether or not the practice became the norm or actually protected the local population is unclear. Emigrants were to remain at their quarters until a doctor gave them a clean bill of health. A er that, they were free to walk around the city as they chose. Prior to 1907, all migrants, including transmigrants from dangerous areas, had to find their own, private lodging. In 1907, responding to repeated complaints from the public health authorities, NDL built special emigrant quarters in the Findorff suburb, a ten-minute walk from the main train station. Those with means typically paid a li le more to lodge at private quarters, usually about 3 marks per day. Eastern European transmigrants gravitated toward what soon became known as the Russian Quarters. A kosher kitchen and a small synagogue a racted the Jews among them. The arrangement remained one of choice. In Bremen, all emigrants— including Russian Durchwanderer—were free to lodge where they chose a er being cleared by a health official.52 When departure time came, the migrants had to travel only a short distance on another emigrant train to the actual port in Bremerhaven. The complete freedom that the transmigrants enjoyed in Bremen was at odds with the specialized transportation system that was supposed to keep Durchwanderer separate from the German population. Transmigrants not only could mingle with the urban population, but also could slip away and leave the city. Both city-states Bremen and Hamburg were surrounded by Prussian territory. By crossing the city’s boundary, which was o en unmarked, a transmigrant entered Prussia. In fact, it was only the transmigrants’ own choice to continue the journey across the Atlantic in many cases that kept them out of Prussia.

Continued Effect of American Remote Control American immigration policy also continued to play an active role in the development of the German migration transportation system. As noted above, the 1891 American immigration bill not only denied access to paupers and those with contagious diseases, but also held the

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steamship lines accountable for returning problematic migrants. Additionally, emergency health restrictions established in the United States against contagious disease reinforced Prussia’s decision to close its borders for Russian transmigrants in 1892. Aristide Zolberg has described the impact of this American policy as “remote control.”53 American officials determined who was allowed to enter from overseas, and who was not. Transit countries like Germany had to comply and implement American policy changes in their own interest, taking over some of the screening tasks at their outer borders that were usually performed at the United States port of entry. The United States immigration commissioner also dispatched medical officers to European and Asian ports who checked passengers boarding ships.54 One of the most influential American officials was William Williams, a reform-minded immigration commissioner who was in charge of the immigration station Ellis Island from 1902 to 1905 and again from 1909 to 1913. Despite Williams’s many reforms at Ellis Island and strict insistence that employees treat immigrants with courtesy and respect, he favored tighter restrictions. Williams enforced the federal immigration restriction measures outlined in the 1891 law and believed that new immigrant groups from southern and eastern Europe needed to be screened. He was especially vigilant in ensuring that criminals, the diseased, and those likely to become public charges were barred from entering the United States. He kept a more watchful eye on the transatlantic steamship companies than his predecessors had, and fined lines repeatedly for submi ing flawed manifests or a empting to land sick or poor immigrants. Williams also held a rather expansive view of the “likely to become a public charge” clause.55 He maintained that this category included those immigrants who had too li le money to travel to a specific inland destination beyond Ellis Island. To that end, in 1909 Williams mandated that all immigrants landing on Ellis Island have at least $25 dollars and a train ticket (or the means to purchase a ticket) to their final destinations.56 Nor would he allow steamship lines to advance funds to such persons. Instead, officials required that the immigrants contact a relative to send more money. Williams expected the steamship lines to “weed out the bad immigrants on the other side” to avoid unnecessary expenditures for the U.S. government.57 First, they would have to pay to support the immigrants until relatives sent money. Failing a successful money transfer, the steamship line would be fined, and would have to transport the prospective migrant back to Europe.58 A er the turn of the century, American officials associated with Ellis Island and the U.S. Immigration Service, such as medical official George W. Stoner, repeatedly inspected European ports to ensure that proper

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protective measures were in place.59 A number of agents sent abroad by the U.S. government confirmed the effect of American restrictions and regulations on the migration networks and inspection procedures in Europe. British politician Major Evans-Gordon reported, It may be seen how the American restrictive law acts in the countries whence the emigrants come. This law, as is known, prescribes a standard of health, character, and property; consequently great care has to be exercised as to each individual who is sent. If in any way unsuitable, they would not be accepted by the steamship lines at Hamburg, Bremen, and the other ports of embarkation, for the responsibility of bringing them back, if rejected, is thrown upon the shipowners.60

In order to avoid costly double punishments, the steamship lines took great care to screen all migrants before le ing them board their ships bound for the United States. The screening started at the border stations, continued at Ruhleben, and then ended with an additional inspection at the port. Although transmigrants could circumvent the procedures before reaching the port, it became increasingly difficult to board a ship without passing at least one close examination.

Conclusion This essay has examined the cooperation between the Prussian state and the private steamship lines to create a closely regulated transmigration system for eastern Europeans en route to the United States. The arrangements of this complex system featured border control stations, medical inspection, disinfection, closed emigrant trains, and special facilities in the port cities. The cooperation between state and private companies was not free of tensions. Prussia charged the steamship lines with implementing the difficult task of screening transmigrants and keeping them segregated from the general population. The steamship lines, however, also had to adhere to American immigration regulations in order to avoid costly penalties and costs resulting from returning passengers to their port of embarkation. These competing agendas resulted in a system that met the goals of HAPAG and NDL more effectively than it did those of Prussia. To some extent, public and private goals converged. The border stations were beneficial to the Prussian state and the steamship lines. The stations screened transmigrants entering Prussia. Statistically, they were fairly effective in treating or turning away ill migrants. Between 1 and 6 percent of those trying to enter a control station were placed under medical observation or turned back. This seemed to support

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the Prussian administration’s goal of minimizing the number of ill and poverty-stricken transmigrants that entered Prussia. The private steamship companies, too, benefited from denying these migrants admission because they did not have to transport them back to the border from the port or even from Ellis Island. Nevertheless, the thousands of migrants who avoided inspection at one of the border stations also highlight the flaws in the system. The border remained extremely porous, and migrants themselves o en chose to go through one of the control stations, despite the opportunity to avoid inspection. The conflicting agendas of the state and private interests became more obvious when considering the emigrant trains. A large proportion of the migrants who were supposed to be transported to Hamburg and Bremen in isolation were not actually segregated from the regular travelers. Alternatively, even many of those transmigrants who did ride on sealed trains were not necessarily taken directly to the controlled facilities in Hamburg or Bremen expressly created for the purpose of further segregating and controlling their movement. Although these transgressions clearly violated the Prussian control system, migrants frequently complied with Prussia’s efforts to keep them from entering Germany. Although the opportunity existed for transmigrants to venture into Hamburg and Bremen and beyond, the vast majority chose not to do so. Most wanted to continue on to destinations in North and South America as quickly as possible. Ultimately, HAPAG and NDL created a system that met the expectations of American immigration authorities rather than fully satisfying the Prussian administration. Yet, to some extent, the United States’s desire to bar ill migrants from embarking for the United States coincided with Prussia’s policy to contain threatening transmigrants. From the perspective of the steamship lines, however, meeting the American demands did not require completely protecting Germany from incursions by transmigrants. Ironically, the transmigrants helped to fulfill Prussia’s goals: the overwhelming majority of the Durchwanderer chose not to se le in Germany, despite the loopholes in the system that gave them the opportunity to do so.

Notes 1. This chapter is based on Nicole Kvale, Emigrant Trains: Migratory Transportation Networks through Germany and the United States, 1847–1914 (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2009). The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and not those of the Department of Defense or the U.S. government.

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2. The first studies were published as the system was still evolving: Leopold Caro, Auswanderung und Auswanderungspolitik in Österreich (Leipzig, Germany, 1909); Karlsberg, History and Importance of the German Control; Hans Weichmann, Die Auswanderung aus Österreich und Russland über die deutschen Häfen (Berlin, 1913); for more recent scholarship, see esp. Szajkowski, “Sufferings of Jewish Emigrants”; Just, Ost- und Südosteuropäische Amerikawanderung; and Brinkmann, “‘Traveling with Ballin’.” 3. Peter Marschalck, Inventar der Quellen zur Geschichte der Wanderungen, Besonders der Auswanderung, in Bremer Archiven (Bremen, 1986), 48. 4. During this period, more than two million migrants leaving from German ports came from territories within the Russian Empire, and between 1881 and 1910, Jews represented almost 50 percent of this migration. See Just, Ost- und Südosteuropäische Amerikawanderung, 24; 36–37; W.F. Willcox, ed., International Migrations, vol. 2: Interpretations (New York, 1969 [1931]), 481. 5. See Geoff Eley, From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (Boston, 1986); Benjamin P. Murdzek, Emigration in Polish Social-Political Thought, 1870–1914 (New York, 1977); Carl N. Degler, “National Identity and the Conditions of Tolerance,” in Identity and Intolerance: Nationalism, Racism, and Xenophobia in Germany and the United States, ed. N. Finzsch and D. Schirmer (Cambridge, UK, 1998), 7. On German and German Jewish views of eastern European Jews, see Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers; Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers; Jack Wertheimer, “‘The Unwanted Element’: Eastern European Jews in Imperial Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 36 (1981): 33–35. 6. Thomas Archdeacon, Becoming American: An Ethnic History (New York, 1983); Zolberg, A Nation by Design; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; Kraut, Silent Travelers; Hasia R. Diner, A New Promised Land: A History of Jews in America (New York, 2003); Markel, Quarantine!. 7. U.S. Congress. 47th Congress, 1st Sess. Chapter 376, 22 Stat. 214, An act to regulate immigration. 3 August 1882. 8. U.S. Congress. 47th Congress, 1st Sess. Chapter 376, 22 Stat. 214, An act to regulate immigration. 3 August 1882; U.S. Congress, 51st Congress, 2nd Sess. Chapter 551, 26 Stat. 1084. An act in amendment to the various acts relative to immigration and the importation of aliens under contract or agreement to perform labor. 3 March 1891; E.P. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy 1798–1965 (Philadelphia, 1981), 405–42. 9. Markel, Quarantine!, 13–83. 10. For a detailed look at the cholera epidemic in Hamburg, see Evans, Death in Hamburg, 285–402. 11. Markel, Quarantine!, 98; “Immigration Suspended,” New York Times, 2 September 1892, 4. 12. “No More Emigrants Taken,” New York Times, 11 September 1892, 9. 13. Austrian Border Blockade, 1893, Staatsarchiv Hamburg (herea er StAH): II E I 1 a 8; StAH: B XI 4; the circumvention of the blockade for Auswanderer (emigrants) at the Prussian Border, 1893, Staatsarchiv Bremen (herea er StAB): 3-A 4 Nr. 125; the danger of cholera infection and related difficulties brought by Russian Auswanderer, 1891–1894, StAB: 3-A 4 Nr. 117.

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14. On the danger of cholera infection and related difficulties brought by Russian Auswanderer (emigrants), 1891–1894, see StAB: 3-A 4 Nr. 117; Karlsberg, History and Importance of the German Control, 44–85. 15. Individual station reports, 1906, StAB: 4, 21–506. For a discussion of these control stations, see also Szajkowski, “Sufferings of Jewish Emigrants”; Just, Ost- und Südosteuropäische Amerikawanderung, esp. 107–23; Tobias Brinkmann, “‘Grenzerfahrungen’ zwischen Ruhleben und Ellis Island: Deutsche Durchwandererkontrolle und Ost-West-Migration 1880–1914,” Leipziger Beiträge zur jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur, 2 (2004): 209–29, esp. 218–25; Karlsberg, History and Importance of the German Control. 16. Quoted in Just, Ost- und Südosteuropäische Amerikawanderung, 98 (my translation). 17. Ratibor and Myslowitz station reports, 1906, StAB: 4, 21–506; visit of the emigrant control stations at the borders and Hamburg and Bremen, 1906– 1907, StAB: 3-A 4 Nr. 290; StAB: 4, 21–502. 18. Karlsberg, History and Importance of the German Control, 76. 19. Individual station reports, 1906, StAB: 4, 21–506; StAB: 3-A 4 Nr. 290. 20. Karin Schulz, “Von Anatevka nach Amerika—Stationen einer Reise,” in Hoffnung Amerika: Europäische Auswanderung in die Neue Welt, ed. K. Schulz, 119–36, esp. 124–5. 21. Auswanderer control stations, especially the one at Ruhleben, 1894–1911, StAH: II E III P. 3g. 22. The term they used was “wilde Auswanderer” (rogue emigrants) or “die gefährliche wilde Durchwanderung” (dangerous rogue transit migration); see “Visit of the emigration control stations at the borders and Hamburg and Bremen, 1906–1907,” StAB: 3-A 4 Nr. 290. 23. Karlsberg, History and Importance of the German Control, 83. 24. For a more detailed description of Ruhleben, see Schulz, “Von Anatevka nach Amerika,” 128–9; and Karin Schulz, “Der Auswandererbahnhof Ruhleben—Nadelöhr zum Westen,” in Die Reise Nach Berlin, ed. Berliner Festspiele (Berlin, 1987), 237–41. 25. Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, Nr. 39, 1900, 612–3 26. Ibid. 27. Spandauer Anzeiger für das Havelland, 17 September 1902; Richard Nordhausen, “Der Auswanderer-Bahnhof in Ruhleben,” Gartenlaube, 43 (1895): 140–2; Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, Nr. 39, 1900, 612–3; Antin, From Plotzk to Boston, 40–42. 28. Jahresberichte der Reichskommisare für das Auswandererwesen in Hamburg und Bremen, Band 1 1898–1923 [Annual reports of the Reichskommisare for migration traffic in Hamburg and Bremen, vol. 1], StAH: I E II 1; Jahresberichte des Nachweisungsbureaus für Auswanderer in Bremen für die Berichtsjahre 1895–1933 [Annual reports of the information office for emigration in Bremen, 1895–1933], StAB: 3-A 4 Nr. 137. 29. Ibid.; Jahresberichte der Reichskommisare für das Auswandererwesen in Hamburg und Bremen, Band 1 1898–1923 [Annual reports of the Reichskommisare for migration traffic in Hamburg and Bremen, vol. 1], StAH: I E II 1; in 1904, 2,803 Russian transmigrants were recorded in Bremen who

Emigrant Trains • 83

30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

had evaded all control stations; in the same year 7,436 “rogue” Russian transmigrants arrived in Hamburg. The numbers remained relatively constant in the following years. The danger of cholera infection and related difficulties brought by Russian Auswanderer, 1891–1894, StAB: 3-A 4 Nr. 117. Karlsberg, History and Importance of German Control, 28. Jahresberichte des Nachweisungsbureaus für Auswanderer in Bremen für die Berichtsjahre, 1895–1933; StAB: 3-A 4 Nr. 138. Emigrant trains and cars were also used to transport transmigrants to Hamburg. For accidents of Auswanderer on the railroad, 1911–1913, see StAH: II E I 3. Antin, From Plotzk to Boston, 37–38. Vorwärts (Berlin), 25 December 1904 (“Mit Ballin unterwegs”). Philip Cowen, Memories of an American Jew (New York, 1932), 233; Sammy Gronemann, Erinnerungen (Berlin, 2002), 294–7. Jahresberichte der Reichskommisare für das Auswandererwesen in Hamburg und Bremen, Band 1, 1898–1923, StAH: I E II 1. This arrangement dated from at least 1908 and ran through 1914; for the contract between NDL and HAPAG, see StAH: 2653 (621-1 Hapag-Reederei, 2653). Kaiverwaltung to Deputation für Handel, Schiffahrt und Gewerbe, 11 April 1911, StAH: XXIV.c 30.5. Jahresberichte des Nachweisungsbureaus für Auswanderer in Bremen für die Berichtsjahre 1895–1933, StAB: 3-A 4 Nr. 138. Transportation of destitute migrants with the railroad, 1892–1902, PolizeiBehörde (Kiliszewski) to Auswandererhallen, 12 December 1894, StAH: II E III 10. Ibid. Transportation of destitute migrants with the railroad, 1892–1902, Kiliszewski to Auswandererhallen, 13 May 1895, StAH: II E III 10. Transportation of destitute migrants with the railroad, 1892–1902, Kiliszewski to Auswandererhallen, 27 September 1895, StAH: II E III 10. Documents concerning Bahnpolizei (the railway police), Hamburg, 5 February 1901, StAH: II E III 39. Ibid. Ibid. Erection of the Auswanderer train station at the Veddel, 1912–1930, HAPAG to Bürgermeister Schröder, 3 January 1912, StAH: II E III 11. As of 1 February 1912, the special emigrant trains were scheduled to arrive at the Hamburg Hanover train station as follows: the 1352a train from Leipzig at 8:36 .., the 1390a from Kandrzin (Silesia) at 12:02 ..; the 1410a from Kandrzin at 1:21 ..; the 270a from Bromberg at 6:17 .. and the 1414a from Kandrzin at 7:26 ... Erection of the emigrant train station at the Veddel, 1912–1930, KED to HAPAG, 19 December 1911, StAH: II E III 11. Jahresberichte der Reichskommisare für das Auswandererwesen in Hamburg und Bremen, Band 1, 1898–1923, StAH: I E II 1. For an excellent overview of the lodgings available to emigrants in Hamburg and Bremen, see Birgit Gelberg, Auswanderung nach Übersee: Soziale

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51. 52.

53. 54.

55. 56.

57.

58.

59.

60.

Probleme der Auswandererbeförderung in Hamburg und Bremen von der Mi e des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Hamburg, 1973), esp. 22–24; Annual Reports of the Reichskommisare for Migration Traffic in Hamburg and Bremen, vol. 2, StAH: I E I 2, Bd. 2; StAH: II E II 4; Die Auswanderer-Hallen der Hamburg-Amerika Linie in Hamburg (Hamburg, 1904). Gelberg, Auswanderung nach Übersee, 25–27; Die Auswanderer-Hallen der Hamburg-Amerika Linie. Gelberg, Auswanderung nach Übersee, 31–33; living quarters for Auswanderer in Bremen, StAB: 3-A 4 Nr. 294 and StAB: 3-A 4 Nr. 251; Arno Armgort, Bremen, Bremerhaven, New York 1683–1960: Geschichte der Auswanderung über die Bremischen Häfen (Bremen, 1991), 71–72. Zolberg, A Nation by Design, 9; 110–113. Brinkmann, “‘Traveling with Ballin’,” 468–70; Zolberg, A Nation by Design, 200, 223–31; Aristide R. Zolberg, “The Archaeology of Remote Control,” in Migration Control in the North Atlantic World, ed. A. Fahrmeir et al., 195–222. U.S. Congress. 47th Congress, 1st Sess. Chapter 376, 22 Stat. 214, An act to regulate immigration. 3 August 1882. William Williams Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Series I. Ellis Island, 1902–1914, 1939, 1. A. Correspondence, 1902–1914; 1. B. Newspaper criticism, 1902–1903, 1909–1913; 1. C. Reports and other documents, 1903–1913; 1. E. Scrapbooks, circa 1902–1910. William Williams, Office of the Commissioner of Immigration, New York, to Commissioner General of Immigration, Washington, DC, 10 July 1902, in the William Williams Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. William Williams, Office of the Commissioner of Immigration, New York, to Commissioner General of Immigration, Washington, DC, 10 July 1902, in the William Williams Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library; Public Health to Marine Hospital Service Ellis Island, New York, 12 July 1906, 51841/129; Subject and Policy Files, compiled 1893– 1957; Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, RG 85; Archives I Reference Section, Textual Archives Services Division (NWCT1R), National Archives Building (NAB), Washington, DC. John D. Trevor Report, 1907, 51411/53; Subject and Policy Files, compiled 1893–1957; Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, RG 85; Archives I Reference Section, Textual Archives Services Division (NWCT1R), NAB, Washington, DC. Inspector Whelpley, abroad, 1904–1905, 52714; Subject and Policy Files, compiled 1893–1957; RG 85; NAB.

@4 TRANSMIGRANTS BETWEEN LEGAL RESTRICTIONS AND PRIVATE CHARITY The Jews’ Temporary Shelter in London, 1885–1939 Klaus Weber

Between 1880 and 1914, the total figure of Jewish immigration from eastern Europe to Britain ranged between one hundred and twenty thousand and one hundred and fi y thousand.1 These figures, however, refer only to Jews who se led in Britain permanently. Many more Jews moved through Britain, mostly to the United States and a few other destinations in South America, South Africa, and Australia. This essay sheds light on the activities and strategies of the Jews’ Temporary Shelter (JTS), one of Anglo-Jewry’s major philanthropic institutions, in managing the flow of migrants and transmigrants in and through Britain. During this period, its officers and those of other Jewish relief organizations, namely the Jewish Board of Guardians, established firm a itudes toward immigration, and cooperated increasingly with immigration authorities. Jewish immigration to Britain from eastern Europe was hardly a new phenomenon in the 1880s. Since the 1840s, Russian and Polish Jews had been moving to Britain. They were widely considered as a major burden on communal funds in London, Liverpool, and Manchester. Probably twelve thousand se led permanently in Britain during the years 1868–1883. The large increase a er 1880 was related not only to increasing anti-Jewish violence in the Russian Empire, but also to widespread poverty, the lack of economic opportunities, strong population growth, and restrictions limiting the choice of residence and occupation.2 By the early 1880s, with the expansion of the railroad and the launching of modern ocean liners, emigration became affordable even for the poorer eastern Europeans. Hull, London, Liverpool, and Southampton became important hubs of transmigration into the New World because of the intense competition between the major transatlantic steamship lines. Rather than opting for a nonstop journey from Hamburg, Bremen, Ro erdam, or Antwerp, migrants o en opted for cheaper travel from Hamburg or Baltic ports to English North Sea ports

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such as Hull or Grimsby and to continue via train to Liverpool, Southampton, even Glasgow, and from there to America.3 The Jewish migration from eastern Europe was hardly an isolated event. Millions of Poles, Ruthenians, Lithuanians, ethnic Germans, Hungarians, and others also le central and eastern Europe for the New World. Many opted for the indirect route via British ports. Religious institutions o en provided temporary lodging and information for transmigrants. A central motive for their creation was to protect the arriving strangers from swindlers who ran lodging houses of the lowest standard, from unscrupulous shipping agents, and from the white slave trade. Some of the Christian institutions for migrants also tried proselytizing among Jewish migrants. One important motive for the supporters of Jewish aid associations was to protect migrants from such advances. More important, however, was the concern of established Jews that their coreligionists might become a burden for the general public. This background explains why the initially quite controversial JTS was established in London in 1885.

Creation of the Jews’ Temporary Shelter In the early 1880s, the numbers of Jews arriving in London from the Russian Empire began to rise steeply, but the established Jewish charities such as the Board of Guardians initially made no effort to care for the migrants. One small institution did offer support, the humble forerunner of the JTS. Already around 1879, Samuel Cohen, also known as Simcha Becker (Simcha the baker) had transformed part of his premises on Church Lane, East London, into a shelter for the homeless and jobless in the Jewish East End.4 Cohen, most likely himself an immigrant from eastern Europe, seems to have founded the shelter of his own accord, without contacting the official institutions of the Jewish community.5 Cohen allowed migrants to seek shelter in an unoccupied portion of his bakery and use it “as a dining and si ing room in the day-time, and as many as possible slept in [… the] bakery on bags of flour and other improvised beds at night.”6 His was probably the only place in London where poor Jewish migrants were welcomed day and night, and where they could pray and study religious literature.7 Understandably, Cohen’s shelter did not offer satisfactory conditions of accommodation, and in 1885 the local sanitary inspector closed it down. Accounts of this event are contradictory. According to the first Annual Report of the Shelter, the closure caused Frederick D. Moca a

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to visit the place. Moca a was a philanthropist already involved with a number of Jewish schools, and was the cofounder and shareholder of the recently established Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings Company, which offered affordable housing to East End working class families, most of them of Jewish background.8 This company was responding to the housing problem, which had become increasingly pressing as more and more immigrants arrived in London. It did not assist those who had just arrived, but rather those who had already started climbing the social ladder.9 The Annual Report claims that Moca a and “a few gentlemen in the West End came to the rescue” of Samuel Cohen’s makeshi asylum, convinced “of the imperative necessity to continue the work.”10 According to historian Lloyd Gartner, Moca a and Lionel Alexander, the Jewish Board of Guardians’s honorary secretary, visited the place and informed the Guardians about the unhealthy conditions, adding, “[S]uch a harbour of refuge must tend to invite helpless Foreigners to this country, and therefore was not a desirable institution to exist.” The Board of Guardians then convinced the sanitary authorities to close down the Shelter. This prompted a protest meeting, held at the Jewish Working Men’s Club, where “Moca a appeared to defend the action of the Jewish Guardians.”11 Among the protagonists of the following initiative to create a new shelter were Polish-born banker Hermann Landau, Bernard Birnbaum, Samuel Montagu, Ellis A. Franklin (Montagu’s business partner), Leonard B. and Henry A. Franklin, and Herbert Bentwich, to name but some of the more prominent community leaders.12 This group was “closer in spirit and descent to the immigrants” than most of the established Anglo-Jewry, represented by the Board of Guardians.13 The city banker and M.P. Samuel Montagu (1832–1911), probably the most wealthy and distinguished among them, had long been engaged in the welfare of poor Jewish communities abroad and in Britain. He was one of the founders of the Jewish Working Men’s Club in the East End. In 1875, he studied the moral and material condition of the small Jewish community in Palestine, and in 1884 he visited recently established colonies for Russian-Jewish immigrants in Canada and the United States to learn more about responses of established American Jews to the Jewish mass immigration. Benjamin Louis Cohen, another banker and a leading member of the Jewish Board of Guardians accompanied Montagu. Both went to North America on behalf of the so-called Mansion House Commi ee, created for the relief of the Russian Jews.14 In summer 1886, Montagu traveled to Poland, Finland, and Russia. He hoped to reduce the influx of Jews into London.15

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British Jews were concerned with both this socioeconomic impact and with the perception of immigration by society at large. The role of London as a migration hub raised immigrant visibility and contributed to the perception of unregulated immigration as a social evil.16 Stereotypical images of poor Jews from the Russian Empire influenced the general discourse on immigration in Britain. They were depicted as strange in language, behavior and clothing, and as orthodox and traditional in religious ma ers. These images also influenced the Board of Guardians. Indeed, the Board, and probably a majority of the established Jews, feared the influx of foreign Jews would damage their social status. No wonder that, from the start, members of the Board of Guardians opposed the plan to create a refuge, more “destitute foreigners in this country,” they feared, would become a “burden on the [Jewish] community,” and even more so for British society at large.17 The initiators of the Shelter had similar concerns, but they pursued a different strategy. Rather than containing migration, they intended to control it, and reduce its visibility by removing poor Jews from the street and sending them abroad. Ironically, the Jewish Board of Guardians had been founded in 1859 explicitly for the “relief of poor immigrant Jews who had no definition or established claim on the funds of the London Synagogues.”18 Only persons who had been living in Britain for at least six months, could make a claim. During the planning phase for the shelter, however, the Board demanded it should be as inhospitable as possible. This demand must be seen “in the context of the long-standing British practice of ‘shoveling out paupers’” and of contemporary tendencies in charity organization.19 Instrumental in forming the policy of the Board was Lionel L. Cohen, a gi ed and determined administrator. He served as honorary secretary of the Board since its creation, and as president from 1869 to his death in 1887. His “Scheme for the Be er Management of All the Jewish Poor” (1860) practically formed the Board’s constitution. The scheme closely corresponded with the concept of scientific charity, as it was developed at that time by the London social worker Charles C. Loch. In 1869, he founded the nondenominational Charity Organisation Society (COS), which aimed at coordinating existing charities in order to increase efficiency. The COS strongly opposed any indiscriminate giving and advocated support to deserving poor, notably old and sick persons. No support was to be granted without prior assessment of each single case. Any able-bodied person was to be excluded from support that was deemed to undermine endeavor and ambition for selfmaintenance. Accordingly, the COS encouraged self-help, mutual help, and individual savings schemes.20

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The Jewish Board of Guardians’s a itude closely conformed to doctrines widely regarded as modern and efficient by leading charity experts. A er a couple of meetings with the Board’s honorary officers, the initiators of the shelter agreed to revise their envisaged plan. The shelter commi ee abandoned the distribution of relief in cash and the establishment of a workshop providing some sort of employment. Once this reduced scheme was agreed upon, Hermann Landau emphasized that the institution would not encourage “the se lement here of the irretrievable helpless, the aged, the sick, the worthless, and the drones,” and rather would promote “as far as possible habits of cleanliness, industry” and self-reliance. The institution would only offer shelter and “the simplest kind of food … given twice a day, at a cost for food limited at 2d. per meal” to “adult male, and if possible to single men,” for a period not exceeding two weeks. Inmates not having found employment within this period were to be “referred to the Board for repatriation.” Cases (but only new cases) should in principle be permi ed gratis, but those having means “shall pay for lodgings and … meals.” Even though this restricted set of services met exactly the recommendations of the Board of Guardians and was even backed by its chairman Lionel L. Cohen, the scheme was rejected at a Board meeting in the autumn of 1885, by ten against four votes.21 Nonetheless, the JTS was founded on 20 October of that year without support from the Board.

Activities of the Jews’ Temporary Shelter until 1914 The temporary location at Garden Street, which had replaced Samuel Cohen’s provisional accommodation, was abandoned in April 1886 for more spacious premises at 84 Leman Street, in the heart of London’s East End. The new shelter offered sixty beds, bathing facilities, and a disinfection chamber for clothes and belongings.22 During these early years, prominent community members indicated in the visitors’ book that the concerns expressed within the Board of Guardians were unfounded. They considered the JTS a “useful and necessary institution” (Charlo e de Rothschild), “excellently managed” (Benjamin L. Cohen), which “does not tend to increase the number of resident poor in this country” (Arthur Sebag Montefiore).23 Surprisingly, according to reports from the early 1890s, the accommodations were o en unoccupied. Aubrey Newman and Nicholas Evans suggest one of the reasons was a chronic shortage of funds. Unlike comparable institutions in Paris or Hamburg, the JTS was lacking regular and substantial income from reliable subscribers. Without funding,

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beds could not be given to destitute or almost penniless migrants.24 In fact, the most generous of all legacies made to the JTS between 1889 and 1939, worth £4,285, came in 1919 from Adolphe Haendler, a RussianJewish philanthropist from Paris.25 Another reason for lagging demand was the shelter’s institutionalization and subsequent improvements, which, it seems, had made its managers more suspicious of potential lodgers. An 1893 report on its activities stresses that The beds of the Shelter have not been occupied for years the reason being, as the superintendent Mr Smith himself told me, that the immigrants were so dirty that the commi ee found it be er to hand them over to lodging-house keepers who, he remarked, were glad to have them.26

Yet, impeccable cleanliness was not exactly what could be expected from voyagers who had made the six-day passage from the Baltic port of Libau (today Liepāja, Latvia) to London on a ca le ship, the only viable option for most migrants. Decks were crammed not only with passengers, but also with livestock and other cargo. Many a migrant earned himself a few pennies on the passage by looking a er cows or ponies on the ’tween deck (between deck). Eventually, the 1894 British Merchant Shipping Act introduced regulations ensuring that humans and animals were housed in separate parts of the ship.27 Poor funding forced the shelter’s general commi ee in February 1893 to take “steps … to obtain agencies to such steam-ship lines as would facilitate the booking of immigrants at the Institution.”28 The JTS began to cooperate with the Union Line and the Castle Line, the two major companies providing regular service to South Africa. The JTS procured the services of these two lines for dispatching migrants. It is difficult to discern whether the funds the JTS received in return from the two lines were commissions paid or donations given, but they soon became “a regular and important factor in the Shelter’s finances.”29 This practice likely cost the JTS some of its initial autonomy in choosing its own lodgers and in advising those who had not yet made their choice for a final destination. Not surprisingly, the cooperation with the steamship lines contributed to a steep rise of JTS-controlled migration to South Africa. While the figures for Africa rose from virtually zero to an annual average of some 730 migrants during the 1890s (with peaks above two thousand), the total for Canada and the United States stagnated at about 350 migrants per year.30 This corresponded with a general rise of (non-Jewish) migration to the Cape, but the financial incentive certainly influenced the shelter’s advice offered to migrants.31 In May 1906, when construction for its own purpose-built premises at 82 Leman Street

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was almost completed, more cash was needed for furnishing. There of course had been other substantial sources for the building fund, such as the Appeal Fund Dinner, which had been presided over by Leopold de Rothschild and resulted in an impressive £15,000.32 The managers also reminded Donald Currie from the now amalgamated Union Castle Line of his promise to make a donation. Subsequent correspondence mentioning the “efforts in looking a er the transmigrants holding your tickets” and “the happy relations … between this Institution and the Union Castle Line,” alongside with the new building, suggest the request was successful.33 In the meantime, the JTS was increasingly embedded within a network of other Jewish charities in the East End, which also provided support to transmigrants. Early on, the JTS cooperated with the Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor and with the Society for Providing Strangers with Meals on Sabbaths and Holydays. Since 1885, the JTS coordinated its activities with the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls, Women and Children, which ran a shelter for women and girls in the East End. Hermann Landau, longtime president of the JTS, had sat on its board since 1890.34 From 1906, both accommodations complied with the requirements of the Common Lodging House Act.35 The JTS also recruited partners for cooperation abroad. In order to efficiently channel the flow of Jewish refugees, it soon coordinated activities with migrant protection societies all over Europe, such as “the Hilfsverein in Berlin, the Israelitische Allianz in Vienna, the Alliance Israélite in Paris, the Montefiore Vereenigung of Ro erdam, the Jewish Colonization Association of St. Pietersburg [sic], … other kindred societies in Amsterdam and Antwerp,” in Philadelphia and New York.36 The agreements for transnational cooperation set up during periods of increasing anti-Jewish violence in eastern Europe remained in place permanently. The cooperation proved to be useful in managing the flow of migrants from the European continent to North America, even a er the numbers declined somewhat following the passage of the restrictive Aliens Act by the British Parliament in 1905. The JTS also secured the support of the Jewish Board of Guardians, notwithstanding the Board’s initial opposition against the creation of a shelter. Hermann Landau had even become a member of the JTS Board as early as 1885, following a proposal that members of the JTS and the Board should be represented on their respective commi ees.37 Still, both bodies “proceeded for years in a state of mutual non-recognition” before they began to work together more closely.38 One of the major fields of this cooperation was the repatriation of Jews to eastern Europe that the Board funded. Between 1882 and 1906—long before the 1905

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Aliens Act came in force—the Jewish Board of Guardians subsidized the repatriation of some twenty-four thousand migrants from eastern Europe, an average of one thousand each year. Returning destitute Jews relieved some pressure of the job and housing markets for Jews living in the poorer quarters of London.39 Even supporters of the JTS such as Landau and Montagu supported repatriation of “undesirable Jews, believing that this would curb antialienism, and ultimately help to prevent restrictive legislation.”40 Yet anti-alienists, notably the M.P. William Evans-Gordon, cleverly used this ambiguous a itude in their argument, claiming that the restriction act would only reinforce a policy already practiced by the Jewish community, and could therefore not be described as anti-Semitic.41 From the day the Aliens Act took effect, on 1 January 1906, the JTS implemented the legislation jointly with the civil officers in the ports. Between 1906 and 1914, another fi y thousand Jews were repatriated, even though the living conditions in Russia continued to deteriorate. Prior to the Aliens Act, immigration into Britain had been subject to very few legal controls.42 Now, arrivals from ships carrying more than twenty passengers in steerage had to pass a poverty test and a health examination. Passengers traveling first and second class were generally exempt, and those who could prove they had escaped from political or religious persecution were admi ed even if their financial resources were insufficient. Even though smaller ships and smaller ports were not controlled, the legislation had a deterrent effect: Jewish and general immigration (and transmigration) declined a er 1906. Several Jewish Members of Parliament, namely Lord Rothschild (Conservative) and Samuel Montagu (Liberal) had opposed the bill; Benjamin L. Cohen (Conservative) voted for it.43 According to JTS secretary Abraham Mundy, the JTS made “right from the beginning … every endeavor to help the authorities to administer the Act equitably and justly, and though the authorities were for some time suspicious of the Shelter, they eventually learned that the Institution never intended to impede their work.” The port authorities informed the JTS ahead of time about the arrival of steamers.44 The JTS, in turn, helped the Board of Trade in obtaining more-precise figures on immigration and re-emigration.45 At the same time, shelter officials did their best to keep the hardship the new law meant for the migrants at a minimum. Hermann and Isaac Landau assisted those who were refused admission to present their cases to the Appeal Board. Leonard Lionel Cohen, a banker and president of the Board of Guardians from 1900 to 1920, was a member of the Appeal Board; Hermann Landau was frequently called in during the si ings in

Transmigrants between Legal Restrictions and Private Charity • 93

a consultative capacity. Out of 2,218 rejection cases recorded by the JTS, 1,161 appealed successfully and were admi ed. The question remains to what extent the Board of Guardians retained its autonomy when one of its senior officers also sat on the Appeal Board of the immigration authorities.46 Given the Guardians’s traditionally restrictive a itude toward immigration, it seems there was not so much a conflict of interest, but rather a tendency toward a collusion of interest between the Board of Guardians and the immigration authorities. The Aliens Act explicitly banned the immigration of undesirables, such as “the diseased, the insane, the criminal, and the putative public charge.”47 Senior medical officers of the London County Council therefore appreciated the expertise of the JTS officers in the field of health and disease control and acknowledged the “invaluable services it rendered to the cause of public health.”48 This applied particularly when occasional discoveries of cholera in some districts of central and eastern Europe or outbreaks in port cities alarmed London’s sanitary authorities, for example in 1892, 1905, and 1909. The port’s medical officer and the JTS closely cooperated in the examination of the newly arrived, at least during the first five days of their stay. Furthermore, the JTS allowed only persons who were expected to meet the sanitary tests in American ports to continue their voyage. Such concerns were not without self-interest, because migrants who did not pass the health checks in Ellis Island and other immigration American stations were returned to Britain. Apparently, the JTS conducted the health checks very carefully. Abraham Mundy stressed that among the hundreds of thousands the JTS sent to North America, only a few were returned.49 The major—maybe the major—task of the JTS officers was not carried out on its own premises, but on the docks where the passenger steamers from Hamburg, Bremen and the Baltic ports arrived. Each case was considered individually, which is impressive given the large numbers of arrivals: between 1885 and 1937, almost 1.2 million people were met at London docks and train stations. This translates to an annual average of more than twenty-two thousand, or sixty-two a day.50 In many years, the annual figure of people met at the docks was much higher. The JTS’s annual report for the year 1903–1904 mentions forty-two thousand, of which nearly one-third were not Jewish, but received the same a ention. The number of those who actually stayed one or more nights at the shelter during from 1885 to 1937 was one hundred twenty-six thousand (about twenty-four hundred a year). Accommodation could thus be offered only to roughly 10 percent of the total of those a ended by shelter officers.51

94 • Klaus Weber

The Impact of War Surges of migration occurred during the Russian-Japanese War of 1904– 1905, when an additional eleven thousand migrants where processed by the JTS staff. Young Jewish men especially le , trying to evade aggressive recruitment efforts by the Russian army. Another push factor was the severe political crisis in Russia in 1905–1906 and a renewed wave of anti-Jewish violence. On some occasions during this crisis, the JTS itself chartered ships to facilitate the voyage to the Americas.52 Another extraordinary action was launched in support of World War I refugees from the continent. In August 1914, the Aliens Act was replaced by much more restrictive legislation, yet it was le to the discretion of the government to admit refugees fleeing the war zone in Belgium through the Netherlands. This benefited more than five thousand Jews who had fled the invading German army in September and October from Belgium. The JTS immediately organized emergency accommodation. In meetings including Hermann Landau, the Frankfurt-born stockbroker O o M. Schiff, Albert Woolf, and members of the Rothschild family, accommodation was organized at the private homes of community members. Again, it was Leopold de Rothschild who headed an appeal for donations, resulting in a total of £40,000 given from September 1914 to March 1915. In cooperation with the local government board, a dilapidated infirmary and workhouse on Poland Street was hastily prepared for accommodation. It was opened on 15 September and housed on average some 850 persons, and on some occasions, most notably a er the fall of Antwerp on 9 October 1914, up to twelve hundred refugees. From the outset Ernst H. Schiff, O o Schiff ’s brother, took up his residence as honorary warden on site and remained there during the entire time the Poland Street shelter was in use. Upon his request, the London County Council opened a kindergarten and classes for 216 children in the same building. The refuge also maintained its own hospital of twenty beds, and even a dental surgery. It was closed in September 1919 and the few remaining migrants were transferred to the JTS’s own premises. A similar accommodation, for about six hundred persons, operated at Manchester Hotel from November 1914 to November 1915.53 From the beginning of this crisis, the organizers stressed “members of the Jewish community [had] to come forward and give with a generous hand the large sum which will be needed for the maintenance and clothing” of their “afflicted brethren.” Their stay would “hardly be a brief one.” The expenses at that time were at about £1,200 weekly—a substantial amount of money.54 It must be assumed that the community leaders assured the authorities beforehand that asylum granted to Jew-

Transmigrants between Legal Restrictions and Private Charity • 95

ish refugees would not cause any cost to local or other authorities, and that otherwise those would not have been admi ed into the country in the first place. Yet the existence of such emergency shelters does not adequately reflect the general tendency in ma ers of Jewish immigration, which actually became more and more difficult. The Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act of 1919 abolished both the Appeal Boards and the exemption of asylum seekers from the poverty test. From 1919, “the only right in law was that of the state to grant asylum if it saw fit.”55 Anxious to demonstrate loyalty with the government, the JTS and other Jewish institutions continued to cooperate closely with the government’s Alien Department, to implement the law. Throughout the 1920s, Britain pursued a restrictive immigration policy. Once one of the most significant points of passage for Jewish migrants from eastern Europe, London became a peripheral city that experienced only limited transmigration during the 1920s.

In the Face of Nazi Persecution In an ironic twist, the British policy to exclude destitute Jews from eastern Europe a er 1905 and German citizens a er 1914—measures that remained in effect a er 1918—affected German-Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi regime a er 1933. In March 1933, when a first wave of refugees arrived in Britain, the Jewish Refugee Commi ee (JRC) was established, one of the most significant among a number of voluntary organizations seeking cooperation with the Home Office. Its chair, O o M. Schiff (1875–1952), president of the JTS throughout the 1920s and 1930s, was by then a key player in Anglo-Jewish charity work for aliens. He also was one of the founders of the Central British Fund for German Jewry (CBF), created a few weeks a er the JRC, to coordinate all funding that was coming in from the wide political spectrum of British Jews. As intermediary between a variety of groups and interests, he became the Jewish leader most trusted by the Home Office.56 By March 1933, the JRC agreed jointly with the Anglo-Jewish Association and the Board of Deputies of British Jews to “guarantee that no refugee would become a burden to public funds. … The guarantee was open-ended. No limit was set to the numbers to whom it would apply.”57 The parallel to the 1914 arrangement is evident. That the new guarantee was to entail for the Anglo-Jewish community a commitment without precedent in scope was at that moment not yet foreseeable. Initially, immigration from Germany was modest. During February and March 1933, only some four hundred refugees arrived. This was far

96 • Klaus Weber

below the figures during the first months of World War I, and seemed to be manageable. O o Schiff and other senior representatives of AngloJewish bodies expected no more than four thousand Jews to arrive from Germany. The Home Office and many representatives of Anglo-Jewry were still hoping that the aggressive anti-Jewish measures were exaggerations limited to the first months of the Nazi regime. Some even believed Hitler would not remain in power at all. At the same time, the government refused any formal easing of the immigration restrictions that had been in place since 1914 and 1919, in fear of heavy burdens on the public purse.58 Against this background the issuing of the guarantee from the large Anglo-Jewish organizations is even more understandable. Without it, far fewer Jewish refugees would have been admi ed into the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, their financial commitment did unwillingly support the government’s understanding that all humanitarian efforts should remain cost neutral to public funds. Even in the immediate a ermath of the anti-Jewish boyco s organized all over Germany on 1 April 1933, the government and the Jewish leaders reconfirmed that the Jewish community assumed full responsibility for the refugees, and thus for an enormous moral and financial burden. The government also le it to the Jewish organizations to decide individually who was worthy of support (and who was not).59 At the JTS and other hostels, emergency accommodation was secured for some five hundred individuals, and a commi ee chaired by Schiff was to seek an increased number of more permanent homes among the community. Yet the JTS’s ambition to serve as central point of registration for all newly arriving Jewish refugees was not accepted by the government.60 According to CBF reports, leading German-Jewish representatives, notably Dr. O o Hirsch, hoped conditions in Germany might improve. In early June 1934, Dr. Hirsch reported on behalf of the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden (the umbrella association of German Jewry, created in September 1933), that “the vast majority of the Jews in Germany do not desire to leave … and were making strenuous efforts to live under the necessarily altered conditions.”61 In late 1934, Hirsch’s reports became much more unse ling. The JTS capacities became even more strained by the mid 1930s, when the number of Jewish immigrants from Poland swelled significantly. In 1935, for example, about 1,750 Jews from Poland and 350 from the Baltic States by far outnumbered the seventy-seven German Jews at the JTS.62 Even though the situation in the Reich was deteriorating, the increasing discrimination in a number of central and eastern European countries—Poland, Hungary, Romania—did to some extent

Transmigrants between Legal Restrictions and Private Charity • 97

deflect a ention and capacities of Anglo-Jewish relief away from Germany. Particularly in Poland, with a Jewish population of three million, anti-Jewish legislation had already been introduced during the 1920s. The regime of Marshal Edward Rydz-Smigly, in power since 1935, “actively encouraged the wave of anti-Jewish pogroms that erupted at the end of 1935 and continued through 1937.”63 According to a 1937 report in the Jewish Chronicle, Polish Jews suffered a “misery such as can surely be paralleled nowhere on the face of the earth.”64 Pressure on Jews was also increased in Romania and in Hungary. Jewish leaders in western Europe and in America feared that hundreds of thousands would soon be forced to flee.65 Against this background, CBF member Harry Sacher declared during a 1934 meeting of the allocation commi ee that even “when the worst had worked itself out in Germany, the economic position of German Jewry would be be er than that in Poland or Romania.”66 The worst was still beyond imagination. The French government was more welcoming to refugees than the British, in spite of anti-Jewish and anti-immigration polemics coming from almost every angle of society. This can to some extent be explained by the much more open immigration policy France pursued since 1918. The French government intended to compensate for the demographic losses and the low birth rate during World War I. France was an important destination for Jewish and other eastern European migrants during the 1920s, and for German Jewish refugees in the years a er 1933. During the first year of the Nazi regime, when sixty-five thousand Germans fled the Reich, France received twenty-five thousand, most of them Jewish, while only twenty-five hundred managed to get to Britain.67 Britain eventually changed its policy in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogrom, admi ing a total of about sixty thousand between 1933 and 1939. Some one hundred forty thousand (both legal and illegal) Jewish se lers who went to the British mandate of Palestine can be added to these numbers.68 When compared with France, it seems that the more restrictive British policy in a way had compelled the Anglo-Jewish community to issue the promise of support for all Jewish refugees arriving in the country. Of course, French Jews too made strenuous efforts to support the refugees, be it through the political engagement of individuals like Raymond-Raoul Lambert, or by the impressive donations from banking magnates like Maurice Stern and the Paris Rothschilds. Robert de Rothschild, for example, gave 2 million francs from June to December 1933, covering about one-third of the budget of the Comité National de Secours, which was created for the relief of German-Jewish refugees. Given the more generous French immigration policy, French Jewish

98 • Klaus Weber

leaders did not have to make a formal commitment such as that of its British counterpart.69 The refugee waves following the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938, the Sudeten crisis, the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, and the outbreak of the war in September 1939 led to the breakdown of the voluntary support system. Some one hundred twenty-five thousand Jews escaped the Nazi threat until the middle of 1938, and somewhere between one hundred thousand and one hundred fi y thousand a erwards. It was this sudden wave of emigration that immediately overstressed the capacities the Anglo-Jewish community.70 Even then, the home secretary worried that “the wrong type of immigrants were allowed in,” fearing that this would create “a Jewish problem” in Britain.71 The increasing Nazi pressure, surprisingly, did not lead to a more generous policy, but rather to a more restrictive immigration policy. Even Schiff “endorsed the introduction of visa requirements.”72 This did not mean that doors were closed, but that the government—o en in coordination with relief organization—maintained control over who was to be admi ed. Their number was actually rising steeply. The figure of fi y-five hundred registered by the Jewish Refugees Commi ee until 1938 rose to sixty thousand by the outbreak of war, not counting twenty thousand who had already le for the United States.73 This culmination of the 1930s refugee crisis was the most evident in a series of prewar events that highlighted the inadequacy of nineteenth-century a itudes in the face of a totalitarian anti-Semitic regime. Private charity was still adequate in 1914, and it was difficult, if not impossible, to perceive in 1933 the scale of the crisis emerging in that year. Only a er the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 did the British government vote for a fund of £4 million for refugee relief—“probably stimulated by a sort of guilt consciousness.”74 Among other groups, it also benefited Jews. Only in the autumn of that year, after the assault on Poland, did the government make another substantial commitment specifically for the support of Jewish refugees by granting a one-off £100,000 toward their maintenance, and from the end of 1939 the government funded half of related costs.75 One of the explanations for the extremely high degree of voluntary engagement—both materially, in providing relief, and morally, in taking the pains of making case-to-case admissions to this relief—lies in the Anglo-Jewish tradition of resolving all problems related to Jewish immigration and transmigration on its own. The JTS exemplifies the continuity of this tradition from the nineteenth century into the dilemma that Nazi anti-Semitism inflicted on Jewish communities inside and outside Germany. The engagement of senior JTS officers in Jewish

Transmigrants between Legal Restrictions and Private Charity • 99

relief organizations coping with the 1930s refugee crisis contributed to the adoption of these a itudes even in face of the totalitarian threat.

Conclusion Like a prism, the history of the JTS reflects the development of AngloJewish a itudes toward the issue of Jewish migration. The creation of the JTS, in 1885, illustrates the usurpation and domestication of older forms of more spontaneous and indiscriminate charity, as symbolized by the makeshi shelter Jewish baker Samuel “Simcha” Cohen established for transmigrants. Many of the wealthier and largely assimilated British Jews believed such grassroots activities were embarrassing and that they would harm their social status. Still, the founders of the JTS managed to mitigate the rather restrictive migration policy of the Jewish Board of Guardians offering assistance to far more than a million Jewish transmigrants from central and eastern Europe until 1939. Yet, practically all Jewish institutions, including the JTS, agreed that poor Jews should never have to rely on public funds or non-Jewish charitable bodies. The foremost goal for the JTS was not to help its clientele to se le in the United Kingdom, but to move migrants to overseas destinations. Lacking financial support from the wider Jewish community the financial situation of the JTS was sometimes precarious. One response was to cooperate more closely with British steamship lines. From the 1890s, the JTS helped these companies fill their ships, especially on the route to South Africa. This practice provided much-needed income, but it also limited its autonomy. When the 1905 Aliens Act was passed, in spite of opposition from influential JTS supporters, the shelter demonstrated its loyalty to the government by assisting the immigration officers. JTS officers, however, also assisted thousands of rejected immigrants with their appeals at the Immigration Board with a success rate of more than 50 percent. During World War I, the JTS established several large-scale emergency shelters for Jewish refugees from the Netherlands and Belgium. Financial support by prominent members of the Anglo-Jewish elite ensured that no refugee had to rely on public assistance. This successful operation provided the blueprint for the JTS’s support of Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution. In 1933, the JRC, chaired by JTS president O o Schiff, issued a guarantee jointly with major Anglo-Jewish organizations that it would care for all refugees from Germany. The JTS’s principles, dating back to the nineteenth century, still applied.

100 • Klaus Weber

Each case was assessed individually, and applicants who were deemed economically desirable and likely to assimilate to British culture were preferred. The government would admit the number of refugees the Jewish community could support, but at the same time would adhere to its restrictive immigration policy. The 1933 agreement thus “bore the hallmark of the Anglo-Jewish tradition, in which charitable aid to the poor Jewish migrants went hand in hand with minimizing the embarrassment they caused.”76 It was cost-neutral to the government, but le the Jewish community with financial and moral burdens. The dramatic increase of refugee applicants, following the German annexation of Austria in spring 1938, exhausted Jewish relief funds. The government established a fund for Jewish refugees only in 1939. Some of the British Jews who were most relentless in their efforts to admit as many refugees as possible into the country, and to maintain those admi ed, came from a circle of families that had supported the JTS since its early years.77 If the British government’s a itudes, and even those of some Jewish institutions and individuals, were not welcoming toward the refugees from Germany and neighboring countries, the activists from these families were among those who did what was possible in face of the existing legislation and their community’s limited resources.

Notes This research has been carried out in the context of the project on “Jewish Philanthropy and Social Development in Europe, 1800–1940”, funded by Yad Hanadiv, Fritz Thyssen Sti ung, and the Arts & Humanities Research Council. 1. David Feldman, “Eastern European Jews in London since the Late 19th Century,” in The Encyclopaedia of Migration and Minorities in Europe. From the 17th Century to the Present, ed. K. J. Bade, P. Emmer, L. Lucassen, and J. Oltmer (Cambridge, UK, 2011), 337–8. 2. Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Britain (Berkeley, 2002), 128; Alexander Orbach, “The Development of the Russian Jewish Community, 1881–1903,” in Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History, ed. J. D. Klier and S. Lambroza (Cambridge, UK, 1992), 138–40. 3. Jewish Museum, London, Finchley Branch, JTS annual report 1903/04, ref. 1988-369. 4. Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant, 52; Nicholas Evans, “The Role of Shelters in Jewish Migration via the United Kingdom, 1850–1914,” AVOTAYNU 17, no. 1 (2001): 31–33. 5. Rose L. Henriques, 50 Years in Stepney (London, 1966), 4.

Transmigrants between Legal Restrictions and Private Charity • 101

6. Abraham Mundy, “Some Reminiscences of the Shelter’s Activities for the Last Quarter of a Century,” c. 1932, Jewish Museum, London, Finchley Branch, ref. 346-1983, 12. 7. Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant, 52. 8. Industrial Dwellings Company Archives, National Archives, London, Minute Book no 1, 3–4. 9. Jerry White, Rothschild Buildings. Life in an East End Tenement Block 1887– 1920 (London, 2003). 10. London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), LMA/4184/02/01/001, Jews’ Temporary Shelter, 1st Annual Report (London, 1886). 11. Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant, 52 (Gartner quotes Moca a’s and Alexander’s statement from Minutes of the Jewish Board of Guardians, 13 April 1885). 12. Mundy, “Reminiscences,” 17; in this account Moca a is not mentioned as one of the initiators. 13. Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant, 51. 14. Cecil Bloom, “Samuel Montagu’s and Sir Moses Montefiore’s Visits to Palestine in 1875,” The Journal of Israeli History 17, no. 3 (1996): 263–81; Winnipeg Daily Sun, 15 August 1884. 15. East London Observer, 28 August 1886. 16. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 128. 17. Mundy, “Reminiscences,” 15–16, quotes from 15. 18. Vivian David Lipman, A Century of Social Service, 1859–1959. The Jewish Board of Guardians (London, 1959), 1. 19. Severin A. Hochberg, “The Repatriation of Eastern European Jews from Great Britain: 1881–1914,” Jewish Social Studies 50 (1988): 49–62, here 53. 20. Ibid., 50. The Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on “Charity,” wri en by Charles S. Loch himself, offers the C.O.S. doctrine in a nutshell: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 10th ed. (Cambridge, UK, 1902). 21. Mundy, “Reminiscences,” 15–16, quotes from 15. 22. Ibid., 21. 23. Ibid., 26–27. 24. Aubrey Newman, Nicholas J. Evans, J. Graham Smith, and Saul W. Issroff, Jewish Migration to South Africa. The Records of the Jews’ Temporary Shelter (Cape Town, RSA, 2006), 21–23; on the Hamburg Shelter, created in 1884, see Liedtke, Jewish Welfare, 144. 25. Jewish Museum, London, Finchley Branch, JTS annual report 1939, ref. 1988-384. 26. Quoted from a Royal Commission hearing by Newman et al., Jewish Migration, 22. 27. Ibid., 16–18. 28. JTS General Commi ee Minutes, 19 February 1893, quoted a er ibid., 23. 29. Ibid., 24. 30. Nicholas J. Evans, Aliens en Route: European Transmigration through Britain, 1836–1914 (Ph.D. diss., University of Hull, 2006), 359 (see table 2.26, based on annual reports from the JTS and on government reports). 31. Newman et al., Jewish Migration, 24–25.

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32. Mundy, “Reminiscences,” 40, 76. 33. JTS Le erbook, p. 235 (13 June 1906), quoted by Newman et al., Jewish Migration, 31. 34. Mundy, “Reminiscences,” 17; Hartley Library, University of Southampton, Special Collections, MS 173/2/2/1, J.A.P.G.W. Gentlemen’s Commi ee meeting minutes 1890–1896, 1–2; Jewish Museum, London, Finchley Branch, JTS Annual report 1903/04, ref 1988-369. 35. Newman et al., Jewish Migration, 23. 36. Mundy, “Reminiscences,” 13. 37. Hartley Library, University of Southampton, Special Collections, MS 173/1/1/1, Minute Book of Board Commi ee 1869–1889, 438. 38. Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant, 54. 39. Hochberg, “Repatriation,” 49–62; Feldman, “Eastern European Jews,” 337– 8; Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant, 30. 40. Hochberg, “Repatriation,” 53. 41. Ibid., 59–60. 42. Bernard Wasserstein, “The British Government and the German Immigration 1933–1945,” in Bystanders to the Holocaust, ed. M. Marrus (Westport, CT, 1989), vol. 1, 394–412, see 394–5. 43. Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant, 55. 44. Mundy, “Reminiscences,” 65, 37. 45. Ibid., 42–43. 46. Ibid., 69–72. 47. Wasserstein, “British Government and German Immigration,” 395. 48. Mundy, “Reminiscences,” 32–33. 49. Ibid., 6. 50. Stefan Zweig, House of a Thousand Destinies (printed pamphlet 1937), copy held at Jewish Museum, London, ref. 1984-143-2. 51. Jewish Museum, London, Finchley Branch, JTS annual report 1903/04, ref. 1988-369. 52. Mundy, “Reminiscences,” 5. 53. Ibid., 93, 95–99. 54. Le er from New Court, St. Swithin’s Lane, 22 October 1914, signed by Hermann Landau, Leopold de Rothschild, O o Schiff and Albert W. Woolf; addressee unknown, Jewish Museum, London, Finchley Branch, ref. 1988-414. 55. Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews, 1933–1948. British Immigration Policy, Jewish Refugees and the Holocaust (Cambridge, UK, 2000), 17. 56. Jewish Museum, London, JTS annual report 1928, ref. 1988-379, and annual report 1939, ref. 1988-384. London, Whitehall and the Jews, 39–40. 57. London, Whitehall and the Jews, 28. 58. Ibid., 27–29; quote: 28. 59. Ibid., 26, 29–31. 60. Ibid., 28–29. 61. Hirsch reported that restrictions on the job market drove Jews into unemployment and that a number had been murdered in concentration camps. Hirsch himself was murdered in Mauthausen in June 1941; LMA, Central

Transmigrants between Legal Restrictions and Private Charity • 103

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

British Fund for German Jewry, Minutes of Allocation Commi ee and Council, ACC/2793/01/01/08, 11 June 1934 and 11 December 1934; Paul Sauer, Für Recht und Menschenwürde. Lebensbild von OĴo Hirsch (1885–1941) (Gerlingen, Germany, 1985). Jewish Museum, London, Finchley Branch, JTS annual report 1935, ref. 1988-383; figures have been rounded. Quoted by Vicki Caron, Uneasy Asylum. France and the Refugee Crisis, 1933– 1945 (Stanford, CA, 1999), 147. Ibid.. Marrus, The Unwanted, 141–5. LMA, Central British Fund for German Jewry, Minutes of Allocation Commi ee and Council, ACC/2793/01/01/08, 15 March 1934. Caron, Uneasy Asylum, 95, 38, 118–220; Werner Rosenstock, “Exodus 1933– 1939: A Survey of Jewish Emigration from Germany,” in Bystanders to the Holocaust, vol. 1, 150. London, Whitehall and the Jews, 12. Caron, Uneasy Asylum, 95–97, 108, 362–4. Rosenstock, “Exodus,” 144; quoted a er London, Whitehall and the Jews, 60. London, Whitehall and the Jews, 62–63 (quote on 61). Ibid. Norman Bentwich, They Found Refuge. An Account of British Jewry’s Work for Victims of Nazi Persecution (London, 1956), 38. Quoted in ibid., 35. Ibid., 45–46. London, Whitehall and the Jews, 29. LMA, Central British Fund for German Jewry, Minutes of Allocation Commi ee and Council, ACC/2793/01/01/08, 12 February 1934.

PART III

@

ATLANTIC PASSAGES

@5 THE IMPROVEMENT OF TRAVEL CONDITIONS FOR MIGRANTS CROSSING THE NORTH ATLANTIC, 1900–1914 Drew Keeling

Transportation Development and Migration across the North Atlantic European migration to the United States in the early twentieth century was a demographic phenomenon of unprecedented scale underpinned by a complex business in international travel. North Atlantic shipping line records document the associated large and highly cyclical passenger movements to and from major U.S. ports:1 Table 5.1. Second-Class and Steerage Traffic between Europe and New York, Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, 1899–1914 (in thousands) Year

1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 Totals, 1899–1914

Westward

Eastward

411 533 578 778 907 796 1,037 1,251 1,378 484 1,036 1,103 806 1,061 1,378 705 14,242

160 209 186 227 306 419 301 402 626 700 349 441 551 526 500 503 6,406

Source: Transatlantic Passenger Conferences, “Reports of the Trans-Atlantic Passenger Movement,” New York, 1899–1914 (PCR).

108 • Drew Keeling

The North Atlantic crossing was a ubiquitous feature of this mass migration, though not necessarily the most arduous stretch of the overall relocation. Between 1900 and 1914, about half of European emigrants to the United States moved indirectly by way of at least one third country before continuing on to a ship requiring at least five days to cross an o en stormy sea.2 The Atlantic transit was not a uniform experience, as will be shown here, but was a common denominator of indirect and direct migrants alike. Migrant travelers benefi ed as Atlantic steamships became larger, roomier, and less uncomfortable between 1900 and 1914, but not because disease outbreaks, travel times, or ticket prices declined. Already by the 1880s, there was a higher average risk of dying by staying in Europe than by emigrating to America, and the average passage price had become equivalent to only about a month’s unskilled wages in the United States. Death rates changed li le a er 1900. The average crossAtlantic transit time remained at about eleven days throughout the 1900–1914 period, and, as figure 5.1 shows, the wage-adjusted average steerage fare in 1913 was almost exactly what it had been in 1900.3 Transatlantic ships did however change in two important ways over this decade and a half: First, they became cheaper to operate due to more-efficient engines requiring less coal. Second, although coal consumption continued to grow in absolute terms over the period, in relative terms it declined, and North Atlantic shipping firms increased vessel size faster than either coal consumption or passenger traffic. Energy efficiencies were passed on to the traveling public not by way of lower fares, but through more space per passenger. A range of evidence indicates that this additional space was used to help reduce the discomforts of the oceanic traverse for all categories of travelers, including migrants. In order to be er understand the causes and effects of these travel improvements, a quantitative summary of early twentieth century trends in onboard accommodations is developed as the next step here.4

Gauging the Improvements: The Incidence of Closed Berths Between 1900 and 1914, eleven million European migrants made nine5 teen million Atlantic crossings to and from the United States. Over this fi een-year period, approximately 85 percent traveled in steerage (sometimes called ’tweendeck), 14 percent in second class, and 1 percent in first class. Most first-class passengers were U.S. tourists making summer visits to Europe. By contrast, 95 percent of passengers in second class and steerage were European migrants.

The Improvement of Travel Conditions for Migrants Crossing the North Atlantic • 109

Figure 5.1. Increasing Fuel Efficiency, Increasing Space per Passenger, No Lasting Trend in Fares, 1901–1913

40%

Percent change since 1901

30%

20%

10%

0%

-10%

1901

1904

1907

1910

1913

Ship size / coal required Ship space per passenger berth Real fare per passenger Sources and Notes: The figure covers voyages between Europe and the four largest U.S. ports (New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore; see also notes to figure 5.2 in the appendix). Size / space (gross tons) from Bonsor, coal requirements based on seventy-six vessels in J.H. Isherwood, “Steamers of the Past” series in Sea Breezes (1949–1987), and Steamers of the Past (Liverpool, 1966) which carried 35 percent of all second-class and steerage passengers in the period, passenger berths (here, first class, second class, and steerage all combined together) from PCR. Fares are steerage westbound (from Keeling, “Capacity,” 228) discounted by changes in the average U.S. unskilled wage (from h p:// www.measuringworth.com/). Second-class fares closely tracked those of steerage (see Keeling, “Transportation Revolution,” 56). Deck plans indicate that space per passenger increased over time for all classes of travel.

The most thorough study of migrants’ Atlantic travel conditions in this period was conducted in 1908 for the U.S. Congress’s Immigration Commission. The Commission’s undercover investigators traveled only in steerage (not in second class) but were comprehensive in documenting situations encountered on twelve separate voyages. In its

110 • Drew Keeling

resulting report, the Commission concluded that “disgusting, demoralizing” and “revolting” conditions generally prevailed in transatlantic steerage. A newer type of steerage, quite “unobjectionable,” could be found on some vessels of “lines carrying emigrants from the North of Europe,” but such emigrants were a relatively small percentage of the total flow to the United States. The report a ributed the introduction of “new steerage” to “competition.” The limited extent of new steerage was thought to be a result of the shipping industry’s market-carving agreements, which lessened such competition. The coexistence of “both unobjectionable and revolting” conditions, sometimes even occurring simultaneously in different sections of the same vessel, was mentioned in support of the proposition that legislation could “complete what competition began” and lead to the “be er type of steerage” becoming “general instead of exceptional.”6 In broad terms, these findings are consistent with other evidence, and the supposition that stricter regulation could have forced additional improvements is certainly persuasive. The report, however, lacks a convincing explanation for the actual improvements that did occur. For example, why competition should lead to a rising quality of service on the northern but not the southern routes from Europe was not addressed (see, however, the next section here below). Even as a simple factual assessment, this report is incomplete. For instance, it failed to note that vessels from northern European ports also carried substantial numbers of transit migrants from southern and eastern Europe.7 Subsequent histories have elaborated upon these Commission findings, but provided few specifics as to how and why shipboard amenities varied over time and by travel route. In his cogent and still definitive general history of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European relocation to America, Philip Taylor made adept use of primary sources, particularly vessel deck plans, to put the Immigration Commission’s report into historical context. Around 1890, enclosed cabins for two to eight migrants began to slowly augment the older dormitory or “open-berth” compartments housing a hundred or more per large room. While the type and size of the beds (usually simple metal bunks) were generally the same as in “openberth” quarters, the more modern “closed-berth” arrangements offered passengers greater privacy, and were typically supplemented by much more public space (washrooms, toilets, dining rooms, lounges, promenade decks) than before. On ships containing steerage with both open and closed berths, the la er was o en more advantageously situated on the vessel (e.g., higher up and more toward the exterior, in be erventilated sections) than was the former. In closed-berth steerage

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(new steerage), passengers typically received a level of service (crew a ention, quality of food, bedding, ventilation, etc.) more closely resembling second-class accommodations than open-berth steerage (old steerage).8 Taylor’s study is one of several situating the Immigration Commission’s 1908 findings within a gradual long-term shi from old steerage to new steerage, but without a empting to quantify the trend. Taylor even believed “there is no way of estimating the proportion of emigrants who traveled under the two main sets of conditions.”9 This is an overly pessimistic position. Early-twentieth-century transatlantic migration was heavily documented. Most of the data are from voluminous shipping sources few migration historians have dug deeply into, but they exist and enable reliable approximations. Shipping conferences kept consistent and accurate records of nearly every North Atlantic voyage and its passenger totals, eastbound and westbound. Maritime chroniclers such as Bonsor have since compiled passenger capacity figures (first, second, steerage) for the ships. Newspaper articles, deck plans, and other such sources recorded the proportions within steerage that were open berth and closed berth for vessels making a third of all voyages, capacity deployed, and passengers (see table 5.3 in the appendix). Given the extensive degree of standardization in the industry, this is a sufficiently large sample for estimating the overall trend. Figure 5.2 (in the appendix) shows the resulting measurement of closed berths.10 Closed berths were indeed most prevalent on ships servicing British ports, and least common on ships connecting to Mediterranean ports. Vessels on other routes (North Continental and Scandinavian) were in between these two extremes. The 1899–1914 period averages ranged from 50 percent closed berths on U.K. port ships to 25 percent for North Continental plus Scandinavia, and 11 percent for the Mediterranean. Second class, sometimes called intermediate or second cabin, was (by virtue of being cabin) made up entirely of closed-berth rooms. Secondclass capacity, expressed as a percentage of second class and steerage, varied by European embarkation region (although less dramatically than did closed-berth steerage): for vessels from and to U.K. ports, the 1899–1914 average was 17 percent, for their North Continental counterparts 12 percent, and for the Mediterranean routes 5 percent. Total closed berths available to migrants, as a percentage of the sum of all second and steerage berths, is thus derived by adding the second-class figures (known for all vessels) to the closed-berth steerage numbers and estimates. The year-by-year development is shown in figure 5.2 in the appendix. The percentage of migrants traveling in either second

112 • Drew Keeling

class or new steerage rose over time on all the major routes, and taken together nearly doubled from 18 percent in 1899 to 35 percent in 1914. It remains then to discuss the likely causes and effects of this limited yet significant improvement in travel conditions.

Reasons for the Improvements Although very uncomfortable by twenty-first-century travel standards, conditions for low-budget travelers on transatlantic vessels between 1900 and 1914 were widely and rightly considered, then and since, to be greatly ameliorated compared to those aboard sailing ships a half century earlier. Most immigrants, focused on establishing new lives in America, devoted li le comment a erwards to the one to two weeks spent on the Atlantic, but periodic complaints nonetheless helped motivate governmental regulation of oceanic travel conditions. Minimum requirements as to onboard space and services were also supported by those who hoped that such stipulations would reduce immigrant numbers by raising the cost of travel.11 The main operative act of the U.S. government in this period was the 1882 Passenger Act. “Honored in breach” as one historian put it, this act evidently had li le effect either upon transatlantic travel conditions or the numbers of people migrating.12 In 1902, William Williams was appointed commissioner at New York’s Ellis Island arrival station as part of reform-minded president Theodore Roosevelt’s clean sweep of the facility. In 1903, Williams started sending inspectors aboard selected arriving ships to assess compliance with the 1882 requirements. He sent copies of their reports, along with passenger complaints, to the port and U.S. Treasury officials having authority to penalize for violations. A typical report was the 16 May 1903 examination of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (CGT) ship La Lorraine: The water closets were very dirty … [as were] … the steerage quarters. … On the floor I found cooked potatoes, pieces of meat, pieces of bread, and orange peels, and some of these articles were also found in the bunks. Section 6 of the [1882] law requires that “The compartments and spaces provided for shall be kept at times in a clean and healthy condition.” It may be that, to carry out this section, it would be necessary for the owners to require passengers to eat their food at the “tables and seats” which are required to be provided for their use by Section 4.13

Inadequate dining facilities in open-berth steerage were commonplace. The typical excuse given was that immigrants, especially those from southern and eastern Europe, “are not used to tables and chairs and do

The Improvement of Travel Conditions for Migrants Crossing the North Atlantic • 113

not miss them when they are lacking.” Overall, Ellis Island inspectors noted that ships from the British Isles tended to have be er conditions than those from the Mediterranean ports, with other ports falling in between.14 Regulations enacted in 1907—as part of the same law creating the U.S. Immigration Commission—increased passenger space requirements to a level beyond that specified in 1882 but below what was already generally in effect. Nonetheless, this may have given a fillip to the ongoing growth of closed-berth capacity and associated upgrades in travel amenities. In 1908, for example, the North German Lloyd (NDL) announced the installation of “a special third class for be er situated emigrants which approaches the appointments in second class” along with a “thorough improvement of its [open berth] steerage accommodations,” to be implemented “as quickly as practicable.”15 In general, however, inspections under the 1882 and 1907 acts had li le lasting effect. As the Immigration Commission noted, an entry port inspector had time for only a “passing glance” over the vessel a er it had been “prepared for his approval and not as it was in actual use.” U.S. government officials in charge of enforcing the acts were sympathetic to the steamship lines and reluctant to impose fines.16 Historians have generally agreed that legal regulations, though significant to other aspects of the European emigrants’ relocation, had relatively li le effect upon the Atlantic crossing. More o en, they have ascribed the general improvement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to competition between the various shipping companies, and explained regional differences in the improvements by ethnic or national discrimination.17 These observations are well-founded but leave key historical questions unanswered. Most particularly, why were the improvements slow to come, yet so clear and consistent as to constitute (where they did occur) a distinct new steerage? The Immigration Commission’s own explanation—that competition motivating improvements was sharply checked by cooperative agreements between the shipping lines—is highly doubtful. Market share quotas under these arrangements applied to steerage passengers only and were enforced by compensation payments (from overquota lines to underquota lines) that set an effective floor on ticket prices. Far from checking competition by quality enhancements, these conference contracts encouraged it, especially in the second class. This class was not subject to the market share agreements, was mainly occupied by migrants, and grew rapidly as a share of overall passenger volume during the period. Companies sometimes willingly exceeded their steerage shares anyway in advance of renegotiating for higher quotas. These

114 • Drew Keeling

market-carving cartels were relatively weak before 1904, quite weak from 1904 until 1908, and relatively strong a er 1908, yet this ebb and flow of cartel effectiveness shows no reflection (as the Commission’s theory might suggest) in the steadily upward (not up and down) trend of closed berths (figure 5.2 in the appendix).18 Competition is a good reason for doubting whether shipping company prejudice against southern and eastern Europeans explains the much slower diminution of discomforts on ships from those regions. Competition—without specification as to how and why it occurred—is not, however, a satisfactory explanation for the significant yet slow and uneven improvements that developed. It also does not account for why steerage in enclosed cabins (as compared to old steerage dormitories) was nearly always accompanied by be er food, more and be er public areas, and “a vast difference in discipline, service and general a itude” of crew members toward passengers.19 Shipping lines, as several historians have noted, were not philanthropists, nor were they in business to discourage immigration of any particular ethnic group. To understand why profit-seeking private enterprises improved conditions for the class of passengers sometimes referred to as self-loading freight, one needs to be more specific about how cross-Atlantic migration operated as a key segment of a huge, longdistance transportation business.20 Notwithstanding significant ongoing technological change on their three hundred– to nine hundred–foot long wonders of the world, owners of North Atlantic passenger vessels a er 1900 were part of a mature, concentrated, and standardized industry. Nearly all costs in this business were fixed—that is, did not adjust up or down with revenues—which meant that a top priority was to optimally market and allocate available vessel space between three jointly carried revenue segments: tourist passengers on the top decks, freight on the lowest decks, and migrant passengers in between.21 To economically operate large energy-efficient vessels required juggling the different needs of these three business sectors. Goods shipment was the most price-sensitive, and competition kept profit rates low on freight a er 1900. The margin of ticket price above costs was higher in steerage than in first class. Improvements to the first class, however, brought prestige to the line and more passengers (including migrants), and tourist traffic fluctuated less than migration did. Several smaller lines relying heavily on steerage went out of business when economic downturns in the United States drastically curtailed migration flows.22 Why was it, however (as John Maxtone Graham correctly observed but without a convincing explanation) that, “inevitably, whenever first and second class were radically upgraded, the same renovative urge

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spilled over into steerage quarters as well”?23 One answer is that the critical need to maximize capacity utilization encouraged interchangeability of ship sections between customer categories. Use of steerage for both migrants and freight, thought to be common on the much smaller sailing ships of the early nineteenth century, was very infrequent a er 1900, mainly because the by then gigantic steamers had room enough in their cavernous holds below the steerage decks to accommodate freight shipment demands; and also, because heavy cargos on the lower levels were needed for vessel stability.24 Instead, shipping lines increasingly swapped capacity between tourists and migrants, and in two related ways. Tourists and migrants had somewhat offse ing seasonal movements. The flow of westbound migrants peaked in the late spring or early summer, roughly coinciding with the peak of U.S. tourists eastbound to Europe. By the 1890s, a rising percentage of shipping capacity devoted to the second class was being used interchangeably by both a subset of migrants willing to pay more than normal steerage fares and a budgetconscious minority of tourists. An additional form of interchange was temporary reallocation of rooms between second class and first class. Temporary reclassifications of rooms and upgrades for travelers were also possible between steerage and second, provided that the steerage units were closed berths (new steerage).25 There is considerable evidence of these sorts of interchanges. Tourist traffic (and the associated revenue from first-class passengers) was heaviest, and the interchange potential greatest, on the United Kingdom–United States routes, as table 5.2 shows. This is a key reason why second class and closed-berth steerage grew most there, and ahead of other routes.26 Table 5.2. Estimated Revenues by Class, European Port Region, 1900–1913

First Class Second Class Steerage Passengers (millions)

United Kingdom

Northern Continent

Mediterranean

All Regions

46% 22% 32% 100%

22% 18% 60% 100%

12% 6% 82% 100%

27% 16% 57%

5.8

9.8

5.7

Source: Passengers from PCR multiplied by fares estimated from sources in Keeling, “Capacity,” p. 272. Note: This encompasses passengers in both directions between Europe and New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, divided by region of European port: United Kingdom, North Continental and Scandinavia (Cont.), and Mediterranean (Med.).

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Marketing considerations also encouraged provision of closed berths, especially on the U.K. routes. Migrants there were somewhat more experienced with amenities such as running water and dining tables. They traveled more o en as families with children (preferring moreprivate enclosed quarters) than was the case with their Mediterranean contemporaries, whose greater preponderance of young single males was more focused on maximizing savings from their American sojourns. Rates of repeat migration rose over the steamship era, and were higher from the British Isles and Scandinavia than from eastern and southern Europe. The typical repeat migrant making a summer visit to relatives in northern Europe a er several successful years in America, having prior experience at crossing the ocean and the financial means to pay above rock-bo om rates for a ticket, was said to be more a uned to travel conditions than the first-time crosser, and be er able to choose between competing lines.27 With an average vessel life of about twenty-five years, the overall quality of onboard service for migrant travelers increased slowly, although retrofits of existing liners accelerated the process somewhat.28 By the end of the period, most migrants journeying between the British Isles and North America were lodged in cabins. The incidence of closed berths rose on the other routes as well, but with a considerable lag.

Effects of the Improvements upon Migration between Europe and the United States The reasons for improvements to travel conditions in ships crossing the early twentieth century North Atlantic are traceable within the actions of a dozen major shipping corporations. The impacts of those improvements upon transatlantic migration are more difficult to gauge because they were dispersed across the lives of millions of families. Some general observations are nonetheless possible. The 1860s transition from sail to steam vessels had already substantially diminished travel times and the risk of death from disease or shipwreck. Despite this, relative to the U.S. population, the highest rate of immigration occurred still earlier, during the potato famine exodus of the late 1840s and early 1850s. A er 1900, the groups with the highest emigration rates relative to source population—Italians, Poles, and above all Russian Jews—traveled overwhelmingly on oceanic routes where the ship improvements came relatively slowly. Notwithstanding affordable travel costs, widespread knowledge of relatively high-wage job opportunities in North America, and borders

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open to European relocation there, the vast majority of young, mobile Europeans stayed in Europe. Migrants’ own accounts, however, emphasize the hardships and hazards of living and working in a laissezfaire United States with minimal social safety nets, not the short-term discomforts of ge ing there.29 Overall, on-board service improvements on the North Atlantic a er the late-nineteenth century had li le detectable impact upon fundamental decisions regarding whether or not to relocate from Europe to North America. There is, nevertheless evidence for a moderate influence of travel conditions upon subsidiary decisions concerning how to move to America (from which European embarkation port) and how o en to traverse the ocean (once or more than once). Most early twentieth century European emigrants had more than one possible route to America. Route choice was most o en determined by the experience and connections of migrant networks and their booking agents. To a limited extent, however, the generally be er new steerage in ships from British ports a er 1900 encouraged continental emigrants to travel through Britain. Organizations assisting eastern European Jews relocating to the New World made efforts to insure that the large minority traveling by way of the British Isles fully benefited from the superior on-board conditions offered by British vessels.30 It thus seems likely that the substantial rise in the rate of repeat migration between Europe and America (to about 20 percent during 1900– 1914 versus about 10 percent during the 1880s) was not only a cause, but also to some degree an effect of trends toward less-objectionable travel conditions. Italian migrants were famously multiple crossers, and most—though not all—did so in old steerage. In fact, however, Italian immigrants to the United States overwhelmingly crossed the ocean only once (from Italy) or twice (from and back to Italy). Shortterm visits by already successful Europeans in the United States, going from America to Europe and back again (for a total of three crossings or more, counting the initial westward move), were more prevalent among British and Scandinavians, and they mostly traveled in closed berths.31 Be er-quality accommodations may also help explain a positive correlation between the proportion of second class and steerage offered as closed berths on vessels and the rate of eastward transits (all repeat) to westward transits (mostly first-time) transits on those vessels. Travelquality inducements to repeat migration, however, had relatively li le impact on migrants with minimal interest in ever moving back to Europe (regardless of travel conditions). A classic case was eastern European Jewish emigrants, the great majority of whom traversed the Atlantic only once.32

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Travel Conditions for Jewish Migrants: An Exceptional Case The limited and uneven nature of early-twentieth-century transatlantic travel enhancements is exemplified by the case of Jews from Russia and Austria-Hungary, who moved then to the United States in greater numbers than any other ethnic group except Italians. They faced a comparatively long and difficult overland transit to European embarkation ports, memories of which were not assuaged by pleasant recollections of the subsequent oceanic crossing. Even with due allowance for what historian Irving Howe called the “imagery of the journey as ordeal” being “deeply imprinted in the Jewish folk mind,” their accounts of the oceanic crossing are generally detectably negative. Notwithstanding some improvements a er 1900, Howe found the “suffering” en route was “real, persistent, and thoroughly documented.” The contrast to the experiences of other groups is notable, and can be accounted for by differences in both the circumstances and perspectives of relocation for eastern European Jews.33 In addition to economic opportunities that pulled migrants of all European ethnicities toward North America, Jews were also pushed by oppression, discrimination, and anti-Semitic violence, particularly in czarist Russia. The majority of Europe’s Jewish emigrants came from Russia, where their rate of migrating relative to staying was much higher than for any other ethnic group anywhere in Europe in this period.34 Noneconomic reasons for moving affected the nature of the oceanic traverse. First, compared to northern Europeans, a smaller percentage of Jews from eastern Europe had the time or ability to accumulate extra funds for a comfortable closed berth in second class or special steerage on the German lines most heavily used by Jews. Humanitarian support from Jewish assistance groups went to help more people emigrate, not to subsidize upgrades. Second, relocating Jewish workers were accompanied by children more o en than migrants of other ethnic groups. Third, relatively few Jewish migrants later spent savings accumulated in America on repeat crossings in more comfortable closed berths. Finally, apprehensions about the small but real possibility of rejection at U.S. entry ports (which colored migrant travel experiences as ships approached America) were more acute for Jews loath to return or have debarred dependents sent back to czarist oppression.35 One way to avoid a dreaded deportation back to eastern Europe was to pay extra and travel in second class, because Ellis Island and other inspection stations only examined passengers arriving in steerage class. Another technique was to break up the long journey with a stopover in England, a less undesirable place to be sent back to in case of rejection

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in America. The crossing was then very o en in closed berth (second class or new steerage, usually provided from the United Kingdom at no extra charge versus old steerage) but the remembered perspective in that case was the successful surviving of U.S. entry hurdles more than the relatively unobjectionable oceanic passage. More o en, Jews coped with the crossing by enduring it in openberth steerage. Jewish humanitarian and political organizations helped migrants get through Europe and appeal for reversal of debarment decisions in U.S. arrival ports. They subsidized travel, pressed for more humane treatment at inspection stations, and lobbied against legal restrictions on migration. Other than the obtaining of kosher meals, however, improvement of oceanic travel conditions was evidently a lower priority objective.36 Instances of anti-Semitism and general mistreatment by crew members were certainly not uncommon, but occasional statements about open-berth steerage being for unwashed Russian hordes, and enclosed cabins reserved for others, do not add up to a significant repeal of basic business logic. Nonetheless, Jews overwhelmingly traveled to North America but once, and economized by doing so in open-berth steerage. Few experienced the new steerage, and those who did were occupied with other concerns.37

Conclusions Whatever their role in other places and times, journalistic and governmental investigation, humanitarian appeal, and public regulation had relatively minor effects on the travel conditions experienced by European migrants crossing the North Atlantic in the early twentieth century. The business calculus of the oceanic transporters enabling this mass intercontinental population transfer played a more significant role. A er 1900, a growing minority of transatlantic migrants traveled in closed berths. These particularly appealed to repeat migrants able and willing to pay a premium for such improved accommodations, especially in second class, which was not governed by cartel volume quotas, and thus was offered at only a relatively small premium over steerage fares. More importantly, the relative growth of both second-class and closed-berth steerage reflected the interest of shipping lines in passenger quarters interchangeably housing migrants and tourists. Such interchanges were most common on routes from the British Isles, which were most heavily used by tourists. Along with the late-nineteenth-

120 • Drew Keeling

century growth of temporary employment opportunities in the United States and reduced travel times (more on land than on sea), improved travel conditions were probably partly responsible for making migration travel a er 1900 more o en circular, and less o en the one-time ordeal that had been more typical in the sailing ship era. Repeat migration was also heaviest on the United Kingdom–United States routes. Largely due to their different mixture of reasons for moving to America in the first place, Jewish migrants benefited less, than did migrants overall, from on-board improvements, and paid less a ention than most migrants to the comparatively infrequent benefits that did accrue to them. To some extent then, North Atlantic migrants as a whole were inadvertent beneficiaries of travel improvements, while Jewish migrants were, in addition, both relatively less affected and less impressed by the improvements. Nevertheless, as with the mixture of forces shaping the overland transit of eastern European migrants prior to embarkation for North America, the complex of influences altering their transoceanic travel experiences in the early twentieth century was an important element of the processes through which this powerful instance of modern globalization occurred.

Notes 1. U.S. Bureau of Immigration (BI) data provide a similar but less complete picture because they omit passengers in the second class before 1903, most westbound repeat migrants a er 1905, and all eastbound migrants before 1908, and are furthermore mostly available on only an annual basis, whereas the shipping records have subtotals for each voyage. The flows in table 5.1, which are the focus of the migration studied here, amounted to about 80 percent of all migration between Europe and North America (including Central America and the Caribbean islands) in the 1900 to 1914 period. See Drew Keeling, “Repeat Migration between Europe and the United States, 1870–1914,” in The Birth of Modern Europe: Culture and Economy, 1400–1800, Essays in Honor of Jan de Vries, ed. L. Cruz and J. Mokyr (Leiden, 2010) [herea er “Repeat”], 157–86, here 165–9, 184; Walter Nugent, Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870–1914 (Bloomington, 1992), 14; and W. F. Willcox and I. Ferenczi, eds., International Migrations (New York, 1929–31), vol. 1, 167, 364–5, 501–73. 2. Drew Keeling, “Costs, Risks and Migration Networks between Europe and the United States, 1900–1914,” in Maritime Transport and Migration, ed. T. Feys, S. Hoste, L. R. Fischer, and S. Vanfraechem (St. John’s, NL, 2007), 113–73, here 130; N.R.P. Bonsor, North Atlantic Seaway (Newton Abbot, U.K., 1975–80), 1873. More on the mechanics and challenges of transit through Europe to America can be found in other chapters of this collection.

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3. For the death rate comparison, see Günter Moltmann, “Steamship Transport of Emigrants from Europe to the United States, 1850–1914: Social, Commercial and Legislative Aspects,” in Maritime Aspects of Migration, ed. K. Friedland (Cologne, 1989), 312; Reports of the U.S. Immigration Commission, 1911 [herea er Imm. Comm.], vol. 37, 12; wage equivalent fares per Drew Keeling, “Transport Capacity Management and Transatlantic Migration, 1900–1914,” Research in Economic History 25 (2008) [herea er “Capacity”]: 225–83, here 227–8, 250 n. 16; transit times derived from vessel speeds of Bonsor, weighted by passenger volume from PCR (PCR=Transatlantic Passenger Conferences, “Reports of the Trans-Atlantic Passenger Movement,” New York, 1899–1914, also see Table 5.1, source), divided by the route distances in the U.S. Commissioner of Navigation, Annual Reports [herea er ARCN], 1900, 312–7, and double-checked against newspaper and other shipping logs. 4. Re: coal consumption, see Drew Keeling, “The Transportation Revolution and Transatlantic Migration, 1850–1914,” Research in Economic History 19 (1999): 39–74, here 45; and “Capacity,” 269. The long-term expansion of onboard space in all travel classes can be traced in deck plans and contemporary accounts (see, e.g., New York Times, 6 March 1905, 5; Imm. Comm., vol. 37, 24–28). Deck plans consulted for this study are listed in Keeling, “Capacity,” 264. See also Philip Taylor, The Distant Magnet: European Migration to the U.S.A. (New York, 1972), 150–64; John Maxtone-Graham, Crossing and Cruising: From the Golden Era of Ocean Liners to the Luxury Cruise Ships of Today (New York, 1992), 28–29; and C.R.V. Gibbs, Passenger Liners of the Western Ocean, 2nd ed. (London, 1957), 540. 5. Five and a half million crossings eastward and two and a half million westward were made by European migrants, who had previously made the (initial) westward crossing. The measurements in this paragraph are based on the calculations underlying the appendices in Keeling, “Repeat,” 176–8, 184; from data in the PCR (see table 5.1 above); and Keeling, “Transportation Revolution,” 56–57. As a share of total passenger volume, second class rose from 10 percent in 1900 to 15 percent in 1914. Migrants in second class were about 8 percent of all migrants in 1900, and this proportion had grown to about 17 percent by 1914. 6. Imm. Comm., vol. 37, 1–51. Quoted passages are from 6, 10. 7. Most notable examples were Russian Jews going to America by way of British, rather than continental Europe, ports, and Italians embarking from French ports; see Murken, Linienreederei-Verbände, 210–1, 288, 364–5; Nick Evans, “The Role of Foreign-born Agents in the Development of Mass Migrant Travel through Britain, 1851–1924,” in Maritime Transport and Migration, 59; Marthe Barbance, Histoire de la Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (Paris, 1955), 156–9; BI, “Report of Conditions existing in Europe and Mexico Affecting Emigration and Immigration,” 1908 (NA RG 85, 51411/1,2; herea er BI Conditions), 21, 63 (chap. 1 subchap. 3, and chap. 3 subchap. 1). 8. Taylor, The Distant Magnet, 150–64, deck plans (see note 4 above); in his book, Taylor uses terminology, employed by a minority of writers, in which

122 • Drew Keeling

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

third class means new steerage, or enclosed cabins. In contrast, the analysis here uses the more common definition (adhered to, e.g., by Bonsor and PCR) of third class being the same as steerage, whether open or closed berth. Taylor, The Distant Magnet, 164. The passenger totals in the PCR are almost identical to those given in the passenger lists gathered by the BI (U.S. National Archives: microfilmed passenger lists of arriving vessels). Bonsor’s two thousand–page catalogue is quite comprehensive. As a makeshi adherence to rules requiring separate areas for single women and families, a few vessels had dormitory-style steerage temporarily partitioned into smaller enclosures; see BI Conditions, 132 (Red Star Line); Imm. Comm. vol. 37, 10–11; Neil McCart, Atlantic Liners of the Cunard Line: From 1884 to the present day (Wellingborough, UK, 1990), 47; such accommodations were closer to old steerage than to new steerage, and are not considered as closed berth in the calculations for figure 5.2. Imm. Comm. vol. 37, 5–6; Zolberg, A Nation by Design, 105, 112–3, 146, 158. Maxtone-Graham, Crossing and Cruising, 26; European countries’ regulations varied but were similar to those of the United States in general nature; they had limited impact on actual conditions (Imm. Comm. vol. 39, 367–425; Broughton Brandenburg, Imported Americans (New York, 1904), 153–6, 179–83; Moltmann, “Steamship Transport,” 317–9). NA RG 85, Entry 9, 51435/1 (Box 13). New York Tribune, 23 August 1905 (in NA RG 85, Entry 9, 51435/1 [Box 13]), for the quoted passage; see also Williams to Collector of the Port of New York Stranahan, 13 June 1904 (NA RG 85, Entry 9, 51435/1 [Box 13]), New York Times, 15 December 1909, 3; New York Times, 30 November 1913, 10; Maldwyn Allen Jones, “Aspects of North Atlantic Migration: Steerage Conditions and American Law, 1819–1909,” in Maritime Aspects of Migration, ed. K. Friedland (Cologne, 1989), 330. Imm. Comm., vol. 37, 413–25, NDL annual report (Schiffahrtsmuseum Archiv, Bremerhaven), 1908, 4. Imm. Comm., vol. 39, 12–13 (passages quoted); see also Jones, “Aspects of North Atlantic Migration,” 328–31. ARCN, 1906, 52, Moltmann, “Steamship Transport,” 312, Jones, “Aspects of North Atlantic Migration,” 331; Derek Aldcro , “The Mercantile Marine,” in The Development of British Industry and Foreign Competition, 1875–1914, ed. D. Aldcro (London, 1968), 335; see also Pamela S. Nadell, “The Journey to America by Steam: The Jews of Eastern Europe in Transition,” American Jewish History 71 (December 1981): 269–84, here 277 (“economic competition, not legislative action”); and Maxtone-Graham, Crossing and Cruising, 28 (“market forces”) and 11 (“calculated nationalistic double-standard”). Aldcro , “The Mercantile Marine,” 335; Murken, Linienreederei-Verbände, 91, 113–6; Drew Keeling, “Transatlantic Shipping Cartels and Migration between Europe and America, 1880–1914,” Essays in Economic and Business History 17 (1999): 195–213; Frank Broeze, “Albert Ballin, The Hamburg-Bremen Rivalry and the Dynamics of the Conference System,” International Journal of Maritime History 3, no. 1 (1991): 1–32, here 8–12.

The Improvement of Travel Conditions for Migrants Crossing the North Atlantic • 123

19. Imm. Comm., vol. 37, 12. 20. Moltmann, “Steamship Transport,” 312; Maxtone-Graham, Crossing and Cruising, 5. 21. Maxtone-Graham, Crossing and Cruising, 2. Because more than 90 percent of the costs were fixed while average net profit margins were less than 10 percent of revenues, a small percentage change in fare-paying travelers translated into a much larger percentage change in shipping line earnings (Keeling, “Capacity,” 231). 22. C. Knick Harley, “Steers Afloat: The North Atlantic Meat Trade, Liner Predominance, and Freight Rates, 1870–1913,” Journal of Economic History 68, no. 4 (2008): 1052–6; Keeling, “Capacity,” 240–2; Maxtone-Graham, Crossing and Cruising, 24; Bonsor, North Atlantic Seaway, 1190, 1232–3, 1348, 1371, 1378. 23. Maxtone-Graham, Crossing and Cruising, 29. 24. Harley, “Steers Afloat,” 1040–3, 1047, 1053. 25. Keeling, “Transportation Revolution,” 50. 26. Keeling, “Capacity,” 238–9, deck plans for La Provence (see note 4 above). 27. Although more expensive, second class provided a be er bargain relative to the service offered than steerage, especially open-berth steerage (Keeling, “Capacity,” 240–2 and 258 n. 68; Nadell, “The Journey to America by Steam,” 274). Unlike in Europe, where migrants embarked from many different ports, more than 80 percent of second class and steerage passengers traveling from the United States le from New York, and many of the shipping lines had their offices on the same street block in Manha an (Keeling, “Capacity,” 252 n. 28). 28. Keeling, “Capacity,” 232. 29. Kurt Amran, Mit 100 Mark nach Amerika (Berlin, 1912), 35. 30. Günter Moltmann, “Das Risiko der Seereise: Auswanderungsbedingungen im Europa-Amerika-Verkehr um die Mi e des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Festschri für Eberhardt Kessel zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. H. Duchhardt and M. Schlenke (Munich, 1982), 182–211, here 203; Michael La Sorte, La Merica: Images of Italian Greenhorn Experience (Philadelphia, 1985), 19. On features added for Jewish migrants embarking from British ports, including transmigrants, see Imm. Comm., vol. 37, 26–27. On Jewish organizations’ involvement, see Nadell, “The Journey to America by Steam,” 281–3. 31. Keeling, “Repeat,” 172; Keeling, “Capacity,” 283. Another reason for greater rates of repeat migration from northern Europe (compared to southern), was the large number of immigrants from northern Europe who had migrated to the United States in the nineteenth century, relative to new inflows a er 1900. 32. Proportion of closed berths from table 5.3 compared to passenger movements from PCR. Eastbound Europeans were more experienced travelers, having crossed at least once already. Ships with a high percentage of closed berths were also generally of more recent vintage, and migrants preferred modern vessels (Keeling, “Transportation Revolution,” 53; Maxtone-Graham, Crossing and Cruising, 23). On Jews from Europe who did move back from America, see Jonathan D. Sarna, “The Myth of No Return: Jewish Re-

124 • Drew Keeling

33.

34. 35. 36.

37.

turn Migration to Eastern Europe, 1881–1914,” American Jewish History 71 (1981): 256–68. Howe, The World of Our Fathers, 92; see also David M. Brownstone, Irene M. Franck, Douglass L. Brownstone, Island of Hope, Island of Tears (New York, 1979), 130. BI annual reports, Imm. Comm., vol. 4, 271–83. BI annual reports; Aram, Mit 100 Mark nach Amerika (Berlin, 1912), 42. BI Conditions, 44 (chap. 2 subchap. 6); Zolberg, A Nation by Design, 222; Howe, The World of Our Fathers, 46–50; Szajkowski, “Sufferings of Jewish Emigrants,” 115. Imm. Comm., vol. 37, 27, 32, Brinkmann, “‘Traveling with Ballin’.”

Vessel

Umbria Etruria Friesland Campania Lucania Oceanic Teutonic Ultonia Ivernia Saxonia Celtic Haverford Cedric Majestic * Merion Baltic Carmania Caronia Adriatic

Region

UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK

Cunard Cunard American Cunard Cunard White Star White Star Cunard Cunard Cunard White Star American White Star White Star American White Star Cunard Cunard White Star

Line

1884 1885 1889 1893 1893 1899 1899 1899 1900 1900 1901 1901 1903 1903 1903 1904 1905 1905 1907

Year

8,128 8,120 7,116 12,950 12,952 17,272 9,984 8,845 14,066 14,281 20,904 11,635 21,035 10,147 11,621 23,876 19,524 19,678 24,541

Gross tons

800 800 800 1000 1000 1000 1000 675 1800 1800 2350 1700 2000 800 1700 2000 2000 2000 2000

Steerage capacity

6% 6% 0% 12 % 14 % 25 % 10 % 0% 100 % 100 % 36 % 10 % 48 % 75 % 10 % 48 % 53 % 53 % 42 %

% closed

Gibbs, 538 Gibbs, 538 deck plans deck plans deck plans Taylor, 157 NY Trib, 21-May-03, 9 Taylor, 161 Bost, 14-Dec-09, 4 Bost, 14-Dec-09, 4 Taylor, 157 deck plans deck plans NY Trib, 21-May-03, 9 deck plans Isherwood (1976), 507 deck plans deck plans Taylor, 157

Source

Table 5.3. Shipping Vessels between Europe and Major U.S. Ports, 1900–1914, with Percentages of Steerage Capacity in Closed Berths

Appendix The Improvement of Travel Conditions for Migrants Crossing the North Atlantic • 125

Vessel

Lusitania Mauretania Cameronia Franconia Olympic Laconia New York * Andania Alaunia Aquitania

Spaarndam Karlsruhe Stu gart Ro erdam (III) Maasdam Statendam Potsdam

Region

UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK

Cont Cont Cont Cont Cont Cont Cont

Holl. Am. NDL NDL Holl. Am. Holl. Am. Holl. Am. Holl. Am.

Cunard Cunard Anchor Cunard White Star Cunard American Cunard Cunard Cunard

Line

1881 1889 1890 1897 1899 1899 1900

1907 1907 1911 1911 1911 1912 1913 1913 1914 1914

Year

4,539 5,057 5,048 8,302 3,984 10,491 12,606

31,550 31,937 10,963 18,149 45,324 18,099 10,499 13,405 13,405 45,647

Gross tons

800 1955 1955 2000 800 2000 1914

1138 1138 802 1900 1026 1900 725 1540 1540 2052

Steerage capacity

10 % 0% 0% 20 % 0% 25 % 39 %

100 % 100 % 29 % 100 % 84 % 100 % 21 % 100 % 100 % 93 %

% closed

deck plans deck plans deck plans deck plans Voor Tech Voor Tech Voor Tech

McCart, 57 McCart, 73 L'pool Jrl, 29-May-11 Bost, 27-Apr-11, 4 Isherwood (1956), 105 Bost, 27-Apr-11, 4 BI "Conditions,"112-13 Isherwood (1974), 321-23 Isherwood (1974), 321-23 Isherwood (1974), 73

Source

126 • Drew Keeling

Vessel

Rijndam Noordam Amerika K. Aug Viktoria La Provence Nieuw Amsterdam President Grant President Lincoln Chicago Gothland * Ro erdam (IV) Russia Cincinnati Cleveland George Washington Kursk Rochambeau Czar Bergens ord Imperator Kristiania ord K. W. d. Grosse * Vaterland

Region

Cont Cont Cont Cont Cont Cont Cont Cont Cont Cont Cont Cont Cont Cont Cont Cont Cont Cont Cont Cont Cont Cont Cont

Holl. Am. Holl. Am. HAPAG HAPAG CGT Holl. Am. HAPAG HAPAG CGT Red Star Holl. Am. RusAm HAPAG HAPAG NDL RusAm CGT RusAm Norw. Am. HAPAG Norw. Am. NDL HAPAG

Line

1901 1902 1905 1906 1906 1906 1907 1907 1908 1908 1908 1908 1909 1909 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1913 1913 1914 1914

Year

12,340 12,531 22,225 24,581 13,753 16,967 18,072 18,168 10,501 7,755 24,149 8,596 16,339 16,960 25,570 7,858 12,678 6,503 10,666 52,117 10,669 13,592 54,282

Gross tons

1800 1800 2190 2046 948 2300 3006 3088 1250 1800 2232 1626 2305 2391 2000 1288 1700 1086 850 2714 850 2130 2386

Steerage capacity

22 % 22 % 10 % 10 % 33 % 52 % 23 % 26 % 22 % 100 % 52 % 13 % 21 % 21 % 31 % 13 % 15 % 13 % 88 % 35 % 88 % 30 % 36 %

% closed

Voor Tech, BI "Conditions," 127-29 Voor Tech, BI "Conditions," 127-29 Kludas, 56 Kludas, 56 deck plans Voor Tech Bonsor, 413 Bonsor, 413 Barbance, 162, Bonsor, 660-61 Bonsor, 842 Voor Tech Bonsor, 1355 Bonsor, 414 Bonsor, 413 Isherwood (1966 book), 48 Bonsor, 1356 Barbance, 162, Bonsor, 660-61 Bonsor, 1356 Kolltveit, 36-37 Bonsor, 415 Kolltveit, 36-37 Est. from Bonsor, 560 Bonsor, 415

Source

The Improvement of Travel Conditions for Migrants Crossing the North Atlantic • 127

Hamburg Prinzess Irene Perugia Carpathia Republic Pannonia Slavonia Kaiser Franz Josef

Med Med Med Med Med Med Med Med

HAPAG NDL Anchor Cunard White Star Cunard Cunard Austro-Am.

Line

1900 1900 1901 1903 1903 1904 1904 1912

Year

10,523 10,881 4,348 13,555 15,378 9,851 10,606 12,567

Gross tons

1780 1954 1200 1500 2508 2066 1954 1230

Steerage capacity

4% 0% 0% 100 % 20 % 0% 0% 19 %

% closed

Isherwood (1981), 158 BI "Conditions," 130 BI "Conditions," 117 McCart, 42 BI "Conditions," 109 McCart, 38 McCart, 39 NY Times, 9-Jun-12, 11

Source

Notes: Cont. = North Continental and Scandinavian ports; Med = Mediterranean ports; Holl. Am. = Holland America; HAPAG = Hamburg-Amerikanische Paketfahrt Aktiengesellscha (Hamburg-American Line) ; CGT = French Line; RusAm = Russian-American Line; NDL = Norddeutscher Lloyd (North German Lloyd); Norw. Am. = Norwegian-American Line; Austro-Am. = Austro-American Line. Dates of newspaper article sources abbreviated (e.g., 9-Jun-12 means 9 June 1912).

Source: “Gross tons” and “Steerage capacity” are from Bonsor (see second endnote (n. 2). “Year” is the first year for which the closed berth percentage applies. Usually this is the first year of vessel service, but sometimes (noted with *) it is the year of a retrofit. Sources for the closed berth percentages are Barbance (n. 7); Bonsor (n. 2); Boston Evening Transcript [Bost]; BI “Conditions” (n. 7); Gibbs (n. 4); Holland America Line, Voornaamste Technische Gegevens (Gemeentearchief, Ro erdam) [Voor Tech]; Isherwood (see figure 5.1); Arnold Kludas, Die Geschichte der deutschen Passagierschiffahrt (Berlin, 1986, vol. 3 of 5); Bård Kolltveit, Amerikabåtne (Oslo, 1984); Liverpool Journal of Commerce [L’pool Jrl]; The Times (London); McCart (n. 10), New York Times [NY Times]; New York Tribune [NY Trib]; Taylor (n. 4). For deck plans, see Keeling, “Capacity,” 264.

Vessel

Region

128 • Drew Keeling

The Improvement of Travel Conditions for Migrants Crossing the North Atlantic • 129

Closed berths as % of all 2nd and 3rd class berths

Figure 5.2. Estimated Percentage of Second-Class and Steerage Berths that Were Closed Berths, 1899–1914 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 All European ports UK ports North Continental and Scandinavian ports Mediterranean ports

Sources: Table 5.3, Bonsor, PCR. Notes: The figure is based on voyages (divided by port of embarkation into three European regions, plus the total for all regions) to and from the four largest U.S. ports. Ninety-nine percent of migrants from Europe to the United States between 1899 and 1914 traveled through those four U.S. ports (New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, shown in the PCR data; see table 5.3). Second-class and steerage passengers between Europe and those four ports made twenty million crossings during these sixteen years on eighteen thousand voyages of 487 vessels supplying a cumulative total carrying capacity of fi y-two million passengers in second class and steerage. Breakdowns of steerage capacity between open and closed berth have been discovered for the sixty-seven passenger vessels shown in table 5.3. These sixty-seven accounted for 28 percent of the voyages, 35 percent of the carrying capacity, and 36 percent of the passengers on these routes. On these sixty-seven vessels, the incidence of closed berths rose from 35 percent in 1899 to 54 percent in 1914—that is, they were at a higher level than the overall averages estimated here, because large modern express steamers, and steamers on United Kingdom–United States routes, both with higher-than-average rates of closed berths, are disproportionately represented among these sixty-seven vessels. The chart here thus reflects trends on these sixty-seven vessels plus estimates for the other vessels based on qualitative statements in the contemporary and historical literature. Second class had only closed berths (of second class and steerage closed berths together, in 1899, 56 percent were in second, in 1914, 41 percent). Steerage was partly closed (9 percent of all steerage in 1899, 24 percent in 1914). First-class accommodations were also exclusively closed berths, but very few migrants traveled in first class. See also Keeling, “Capacity,” esp. 248 n. 8, 255 n. 56.

@6 RUSSIAN-JEWISH TRANSMIGRATION AND SCANDINAVIAN SHIPPING COMPANIES The Case of DFDS and the Atlantic Rate War of 1904–1905 Per Kristian Sebak

Between 1880 and 1914, an estimated 1.5 million Jews emigrated from czarist Russia to North America.1 The vast majority passed through border stations into Germany and Austria-Hungary. They continued by train to the ports of Hamburg, Bremen, Ro erdam, and Antwerp, where they boarded steamers for North America. Beginning in the early 1890s, some opted for an alternative route that led from the Russian port of Libau on the Baltic to the British ports of Hull, Grimsby, and London. From there, migrants traveled by train to the port of Liverpool, sometimes to Glasgow, and a er 1900 to Southampton. The rising Jewish migration to and through Britain, not least from Baltic ports, played a role in the debate about the British Aliens Act passed in 1905 that restricted Russian-Jewish immigration.2 There was also a li le-known third route from Russia to North America around the turn of the twentieth century. It bypassed imperial Germany and Britain, leading through Scandinavian ports. The Danish Thingvalla Line/DFDS (Det Forenede Dampskibs-Selskab or United Steamship Company) offered a direct service to the United States from Copenhagen to New York via Christiania (Oslo) and Kristiansand in Norway.3 A comprehensive network of passenger routes, also mainly operated by DFDS, connected Copenhagen with Russian ports in the eastern Baltic; surprisingly, only a small number of Russian Jews took advantage of the route through Scandinavia to North America.4 The main objectives of this essay are threefold: (1) I will examine why only a small number of Russian-Jewish emigrants opted for the Scandinavian route; (2) I will show how the flow of specific migrant groups, in this case Russian Jews, was subject to structural changes in the shipping business; (3) and finally, I will discuss why Russian Jews used the services of DFDS during the Atlantic rate war of 1904–1905. The Atlan-

Russian-Jewish Transmigration and Scandinavian Shipping Companies • 131

tic rate war was the most publicized conflict between the major Atlantic steamship lines between 1880 and 1914. DFDS deserves particular a ention in this context for two reasons. First, it was one of very few passenger lines in northern Europe that, until 1910, did not join one of the transatlantic passenger conferences. These agreements between the main shipping lines defined the transatlantic passenger business from the mid 1890s until the early 1910s. They limited competition by fixing ticket prices, allocating passenger markets, regulating the activities of ticket agents, and administering pools (giving each member an agreed percentage of revenues). Second, during the Atlantic rate war, DFDS lost one of its steamers, the Norge, inflicting both short-term and longterm disruption to its business. The Norge struck a reef near Rockall, off Scotland, on 28 June 1904, and 635 of the 795 passengers and crew perished. This was the most calamitous disaster in the Atlantic prior to the Titanic in 1912. Of the 242 Russian subjects on board, 207 died; almost all of these were Jewish.5 Combining the above objectives will fill several gaps in our understanding of transatlantic migration history in general and Jewish emigration in particular. This concerns two aspects in particular that few scholars have addressed: how was it possible for millions of migrants in general, and a few million Russian Jews in particular, to cross numerous political borders and a vast ocean during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, and how were the migratory routes shaped and defined?6 Scholars outside Scandinavia focus almost exclusively on German and British companies that transported migrants from Russia to America. Correspondingly, Scandinavian scholars concentrate on Scandinavian emigrants leaving Scandinavia on Scandinavian or British emigrant steamers. Analyzing the transmigration of non-Scandinavians via Scandinavian ports provides a new perspective on the transatlantic mass migration before 1914.

Emigration Traffic and Scandinavian-American Lines Superficially, geography and the predominance of Scandinavian countries in world shipping should have a racted many more Russian-Jewish and other eastern European passengers to Copenhagen and other Scandinavian ports for the passage to North America. Around 1900, Norway had the fourth-largest merchant marine in the world. DFDS, one of the largest shipping companies in the world, was based in Denmark. Furthermore, around 2.5 million Scandinavians emigrated to North America between the 1860s and the 1920s. Nevertheless, Scan-

132 • Per Kristian Sebak

dinavian shipping companies played only a minor role in the direct transportation of non-Scandinavians to America between 1880 and 1914. Denmark opened its first permanent service in 1879 (Thingvalla Line), with Norwegians becoming that line’s most important customers. Compared with the number of Scandinavians who migrated via Britain to America, however, the Danish line never managed to win a big share of the Scandinavian market. Norway’s first permanent American line was established only in 1913 (the Norwegian-American Line), the first Swedish transatlantic line followed in 1915 (the Swedish-American Line). To understand why the direct America traffic from Scandinavia was limited, and why so few Russian-Jewish transatlantic migrants traveled via Scandinavia, it is necessary to look at several characteristics of the transatlantic passenger business prior to 1914. The emigrant traffic to America was seasonal and subject to business cycles. For example, eighteen thousand seven hundred people emigrated from Norway in 1893, on the eve of a serious recession in the United States. The following year the number dropped to fi y-six hundred. In 1902, the number increased again to twenty thousand three hundred. The emigrant season usually lasted from March to September.7 Periods with fewer emigrants than expected could cause great financial difficulties, especially for small shipping companies with limited reserves and flexibility, driving some lines out of business.8 For this reason, operating a sustainable transatlantic passenger line required substantial capital. Until the end of the nineteenth century, capitalintensive shipping was limited in Scandinavia. Apart from the DanishAmerican service and a short-lived Norwegian-American Line in the 1870s, the only overseas (i.e., intercontinental) Scandinavian line that was established prior to 1904 was the East Asiatic Company in 1897.9 In addition to the operational costs, the type of passenger steamers used on the North Atlantic also required significant investments. By the turn of the century, steamers were generally tailor-made for emigrant traffic, increasingly catering to a mass market. The largest steamers in the world were found on the North-Atlantic run, with the biggest liner reaching from thirteen thousand five hundred tons in 1893 to fi y-four thousand tons in 1914. Smaller shipping companies could not justify economically the acquisition of large ships. If the number of migrants were to drop dramatically, for instance due to stricter legislation or a recession, the large steamers could become an enormous financial burden. Large vessels were too expensive to operate as cargo freighters alone, and some of the ships were too big for many ports.10 Stricter safety regulations imposed by various governments in regard to the outfi ing of emigrant steamers also affected the Scandinavian

Russian-Jewish Transmigration and Scandinavian Shipping Companies • 133

lines’ ability to operate a transatlantic passenger service. Passengers were guaranteed minimum compartment space, and ships had to be sufficiently ventilated and meet various sanitary requirements.11 By the turn of the century, many shipping companies outfi ed their steerage compartments with cabins instead of with large dormitory-style rooms filled with bunk beds.12 This increased passenger comfort but made it more difficult to use the vessels for other purposes. The Scandinavian lines were also affected by the concentration in the transatlantic passenger business. By 1900, a few lines dominated the North Atlantic routes and it became difficult for outsiders to gain even a limited market share. Before the 1890s, a number of smaller independent lines shipped passengers to America. In the 1870s, for example, there were three companies operating from Belgium alone, but by the turn of the century only one remained. In 1890, six lines transported passengers between Liverpool and New York. In 1901, just two were le .13 Various conference agreements between British and continental companies, negotiated during the 1890s and early 1900s, limited competition and created, in effect, barriers of entry for potential newcomers like Scandinavian companies. The participating lines divided the migration market by allocating quotas and emigration markets. For example, Scandinavia “belonged” to the British lines and DFDS.14 Very few Norwegian emigrants were sent via Germany or other continental ports. The bar for entering this market was raised farther when the American business tycoon John Pierpont (J.P.) Morgan became involved in the transatlantic passenger business in 1902. He established the International Mercantile Marine Company, a syndicate that most of the major British and north-continental transatlantic lines joined.15 The Thingvalla Line, predecessor of DFDS’s America line, did not survive the structural changes within the transatlantic passenger business during the 1890s and early 1900s. Instead, the company was driven into the arms of the financially stronger DFDS in 1898.16 DFDS, however, also struggled to accommodate to the structural changes in the transatlantic passenger business. DFDS inherited four relatively old so-called regular steamers (Thingvalla, Norge, Island, and Hekla) from Thingvalla. These were among the largest in the Danish merchant fleet and perfectly suitable for emigration traffic in accordance with Danish law. The ships, however, did not meet the increasingly high standard of the North Atlantic passenger routes. The lines competed primarily over frequency of service, speed, space, size, and comfort.17 Thus it does not surprise that DFDS struggled to fill its regular steamers. In 1903, for example, a record twenty-six thousand seven hundred emigrants le Norway, overwhelmingly for America.18 But on its two regular depar-

134 • Per Kristian Sebak

tures in June 1903, traditionally one of the busiest months of the year, DFDS carried 220 and 80 passengers, respectively, even though the capacity on both occasions was around 700 and the fares on its regular steamers were cheaper.19 If the line wanted to compete seriously on the North Atlantic, a major and costly renewal of the fleet was unavoidable. In 1900, DFDS sold one of the regular liners and ordered three state-ofthe-art twin-screw (i.e., two-propeller) steamers (Oscar II, Hellig Olav, and United States). These were considerably larger and faster than any contemporary Danish vessel, and were fronted as the biggest steamers of the Nordic and Baltic lands. In addition, DFDS fi ed the three remaining regular liners with cabins for families and women traveling alone.20

Jewish Migrants from the Russian Empire and Scandinavian Shipping Lines Although DFDS was commi ed to honoring an agreement between the Thingvalla Line and HAPAG from 1895, confining its emigrant business to Scandinavia and Finland (which belonged to the Russian Empire), DFDS nonetheless became heavily involved in shipping primarily Jewish and other migrants from Russia. Beginning in 1876, an alternative route for Russian emigrants gradually developed, when a railway line to the ice-free Russian port of Libau (today Liepāja, Latvia) in the Baltic was completed.21 Libau offered a more convenient journey to North America from the Pale of Se lement, an area stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea where most of Russia’s five million Jews lived in 1900. Libau appeared as an a ractive alternative to the long tiresome railroad journey across central Europe to the North Sea ports Bremen, Hamburg, Ro erdam, or Antwerp. DFDS had already built up a comprehensive network of routes from its hub in Copenhagen to ports around the Baltic. Libau emerged as one of its most important terminals, following favorable agreements with Russian authorities and railway companies.22 In the 1890s, DFDS encountered stiff competition from the Wilson Line of Hull in northeast England in forwarding migrants from Libau to British transatlantic passenger lines. While DFDS had secured a strong position in the Baltic, the Wilson Line had long controlled the traffic between Scandinavia and Britain. As with the major transatlantic lines, the two companies eventually decided to cooperate. While several routes were run jointly, DFDS secured exclusive rights to transport emigrants from Libau to Hull. This was by far the most lucrative

Russian-Jewish Transmigration and Scandinavian Shipping Companies • 135

passenger route from the Baltic.23 The first sailing was in 1893, and at least once a week a Danish liner would depart from Libau with Jewish and other emigrants. According to DFDS’s statistics, the total number of emigrants shipped from Libau to Hull between 1900 and 1908 was seventy-five thousand nine hundred; a further thirty-three thousand six hundred traveled to London.24 A er a short railroad journey from Hull across Yorkshire, most of these passengers continued from Liverpool to North America.

The Atlantic Rate War of 1904–1905 The Atlantic rate war largely resulted from mounting tension between the British Cunard Line and continental lines following the formation of J.P. Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine Company in 1902. The Cunard Line declined to be part of this syndicate, and pulled out of the existing pool agreement with the continental lines in May 1903. Subsequently, it entered into an agreement with the Hungarian government to open an emigrant route from Fiume on the Adriatic coast. The continental lines regarded the Cunard Line’s direct service from AustriaHungary to New York as a threat to its main market in eastern Europe. The result was an intensive price war from February 1904, and for a relatively brief period a level playing field for all lines offering transatlantic services. The Atlantic rate war of 1904–1905 was the first time that a significant number of transmigrants from the Russian Empire were directed toward a Scandinavian port for shipment to North America.25 The five continental lines HAPAG, the Norddeutscher Lloyd (North German Lloyd; NDL), the Holland-America Line, the Red Star Line (Belgium), and the French Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (CGT) countera acked by launching a joint line (Scandia Line) direct from Scandinavia to disrupt the Cunard Line’s strong position there. The fare was reduced from 120 to 60 kroner (1 kroner was US$3.70 or £18.20) from all points in Scandinavia.26 The service was to originate at the German Baltic port of Ste in (though it was not intended for German passengers), with calls at Helsingborg in Sweden and Kristiansand in Norway. This constituted a major challenge for Cunard—and for DFDS’s American service. Not only did a competitor enter its main market and undermine its position as the only carrier offering direct service between Scandinavia and the United States, but the massive reduction in fares hurt DFDS even more. The Atlantic rate war came at a most inconvenient time for DFDS. As mentioned, the company had recently commissioned considerably

136 • Per Kristian Sebak

larger and more costly ocean liners. DFDS now was forced to drop its prices, stressing, “the rate will not last for long.”27 While low fares constituted a problem, the conflict between the Cunard Line and continental lines also created a sudden and unexpected business opportunity for DFDS. At a DFDS board meeting in March 1904, the directors decided to start transporting migrants from the Russian Empire directly to New York, and not only to Britain for other lines. According to the minutes, DFDS’s initial motive to do this was to drive HAPAG out of Scandinavia, as Russian passengers were particularly important for the German company.28 This strategy, however, did not pay off immediately. Although DFDS recognized the Russian traffic as a good business opportunity for its New York service in theory, it risked being punished by the continental lines through further price cuts. The rate war alone cost DFDS 1 million kroner (the equivalent of US$11 million today), and prompted company directors to consider changing the structure of the transatlantic business altogether.29 As it turned out, the biggest increase in migrant numbers during the rate war was from Russia and the British Isles. From Sweden, the most important emigration market in Scandinavia, the number of emigrants actually declined significantly, from thirty-five thousand in 1903 to eighteen thousand five hundred in 1904.30 According to DFDS board meeting minutes, DFDS’s approach to the Russian market was supported by what the minutes called “Liverpool,” which most likely referred to the Liverpool-based Cunard Line.31 For Cunard, DFDS continued to play an essential role in feeding passengers from Libau to Britain. Indeed, the total number of emigrants from Russia to North America during 1904 increased significantly compared with 1903 and 1902.32 Following several meetings throughout the fall of 1904, the rate war was finally resolved on 17 January 1905, with all rates being raised immediately.33

Jewish Migration via Scandinavia during the Atlantic Rate War Neither the Danish Ministry of Justice Act of 1870 on the direct shipment of migrants to America, nor the Danish Immigration Act of 1875 included specific regulations on shipping companies engaged in forwarding transmigrants through Denmark. Carrying passengers from Russia via Copenhagen to the United States meant that DFDS had to make several short-term practical adjustments. Until 1904, there had been no need to deal with transmigrants, but now it had to care for passengers while they were in transit in Copenhagen. All DFDS’s Nor-

Russian-Jewish Transmigration and Scandinavian Shipping Companies • 137

wegian passengers boarded at Christiania and Kristiansand in Norway, while the handful of Swedes came predominantly from places close to the Norwegian border, or from Malmö or Helsingborg, in the immediate vicinity of Copenhagen. DFDS was entitled to ship Finnish passengers, but only a few used this service before 1904.34 Having transported passengers from Libau for more than a decade, DFDS managed to adjust quickly. The company was tied to shipping brokers in most Baltic ports, including St. Petersburg, Riga, Windau, and, of course, Libau. Specialized migrant brokers dealt with the actual processing of migrants. The leading and possibly only migrant brokers in Libau were Karlsberg, Spiro & Company and Knie, Falk & Company. The available correspondence from 1904 indicates that Knie, Falk & Company booked Jewish passengers for DFDS’s American line.35 The migrant flow through Libau during the early stages of the Atlantic rate war was so great that the brokers could hardly cope. Indeed, in April 1904 Karlsberg, Spiro & Company asked the Wilson Line’s agent in Riga to take emigrants from Libau to Britain as they were “unable to deal with the whole lot of them in Libau.”36 It is uncertain whether this was done because DFDS had exclusive rights to operate the passenger services from Libau to Britain. The actual forwarding process for Russian passengers was the same as with migrants being shipped to Britain. Tickets were issued to passengers who showed a certificate of good health. DFDS used the same kind of steamers that normally would transport migrants to Britain. These were relatively small, such as the 830-ton Thyra mainly built for freight. It could carry up to three hundred passengers in large dormitories on the two-day voyage from Libau to Copenhagen. Arriving in Copenhagen, Russian subjects, including Finns, faced several inspections. They usually required accommodation for at least two nights. Li le is known about how this was done, but the liner from Libau would dock at the free port on the northern part of the harbor and away from the city center. Presumably, accommodation was arranged in this area. In addition, all Russian subjects en route to the United States faced a compulsory and thorough health check. When predominantly Scandinavian passengers were carried on DFDS’s American liners prior to the rate war, they were not required to undergo any health inspection before reaching Copenhagen. As an extension to the health check already carried out in Libau and other Russian ports, Russian subjects were required to present a certificate of good health and agree to an examination by a police surgeon on arrival in Copenhagen, and once again on the day of sailing, this time together with the other passengers. Present during the second inspection were a police inspector,

138 • Per Kristian Sebak

city physician, and the American consul-general or vice-consul. Special a ention was given to examining the eyes and scalp of the emigrant. While very few Scandinavians and Finnish passengers were ever rejected in Copenhagen, around 10 percent of Russian subjects (excluding Finns) were sent back.37 Judging by a few known cases in June 1904, this meant that the rejected passenger underwent the dreadful ordeal of being sent back to Libau, at the company’s expense, while his or her traveling companion(s) continued as planned to New York. Migrant Vigdor Gurevitz, who sent a postcard from Copenhagen to his wife in Russia in June 1904, provided a rare impression of the hassle and anxiety of consecutive health checks. Gurevitz was en route from the Pale of Se lement to Connecticut. His wife and children were supposed to take the same route soon a erward: I want to tell you that today the doctor examined our heads, our hands and our fingers: no more, and he pronounced us all fit. … It would appear that we have now suffered the last of the disagreeable experiences. … Look a er your health and your eyes and take care of the children.38

Another task for the company was to solve the language barrier on board ship, where previously everybody understood everybody on the up to two-and-a-half week voyage to New York. This was to some extent solved by employing additional personnel proficient in Yiddish. These so-called loose stewards (translated from Danish løs opvarter) were emigrants who in return for working as stewards were reimbursed 50 percent of their fare. Appointing loose stewards was in itself a useful arrangement for several of the companies as the number of steerage passengers returning to Europe dropped considerably. The number of loose stewards was, however, hardly adequate, given the vast number of Jewish passengers. A usual further solution was to accommodate all Jews in separate parts of the ship, so they had limited interaction with Scandinavians and stayed to themselves. There are no indications that the ship’s cook would prepare kosher meals. Some Jewish passengers most likely brought their own food, although meal services were included in the ticket price.39 The ship’s physician probably faced the biggest additional workload. According to medical records from five DFDS American liners in 1904, Jewish passengers frequently suffered from seasickness, and many required medical treatment. The doctors o en had problems communicating with patients. This was demonstrated on one occasion when a child became seriously ill, and the mother frantically tried to communicate what was wrong. In the end, a passenger came forward

Russian-Jewish Transmigration and Scandinavian Shipping Companies • 139

who could speak imperfect German, being similar to Yiddish, and the child was saved.40 Perhaps one of the biggest challenges for DFDS when shipping Jewish migrants was to not alienate prospective Scandinavian customers. DFDS had earned a reputation as the Scandinavian carrier, with Scandinavian crew, Scandinavian food, and Scandinavian passengers. Apart from not having to disembark before reaching America, there was no other big selling point for DFDS compared with the choice of going via Britain. The British liners were bigger, more comfortable, and seemingly safer (the Danish line was haunted by a range of mishaps between the 1880s and 1905); in addition, going via Britain was o en faster than the direct journey from Scandinavia, thus minimizing the risk of seasickness. Furthermore, it was commonplace for newly arrived immigrants in America to write le ers back home and describe their voyage. These would frequently appear in newspapers, especially in rural areas. There are several such accounts in Norwegian newspapers during the summer of 1904, at the height of the rate war. Jews or Russians, as the subjects were o en referred to, were increasingly stigmatized: “The Russians are more animal than human in their behavior,” as a Norwegian emigrant described his experience from a Cunard liner on the front page of a Norwegian newspaper in August 1904.41 Several other le ers contained similar accusations. In this case, most of them were wri en by survivors of the Norge disaster and might have been influenced by allegations of bad conduct among Jews in the lifeboats. There are no known similar detailed eyewitness accounts from any of the Jewish survivors of the Norge disaster.42 Already in March of 1904, three months before the Norge disaster, the passengers’ ethnicity was an issue for the shipping companies. DFDS continued stressing in advertisements that its steamers had a “Scandinavian crew, Scandinavian passengers, Scandinavian food,” contrasting sharply with its new competitor Scandia Line with a mostly German crew, German ships, and offering German food. Probably as a direct response to this claim, the Scandia Line changed its advertisements within a short space of time by clearly emphasizing, “The ONLY LINE that carries Scandinavian and Finnish passengers EXCLUSIVELY.”43 The advertisements suggest that Scandia had discovered in the meantime that DFDS served Jewish emigrants, and a empted to exploit increasing nationalism and hostility toward foreigners in Norway.44 At the same time, it may also be a sign of discontent with DFDS and its collaboration with the Cunard Line, especially in relation to the emigrant business in Libau. Covering the rate war extensively, Danish papers viewed the whole conflict as a “desire by the American trust

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[International Mercantile Marine Company] and its continental partners [HAPAG and NDL] to harm DFDS as much as possible.”45 By the summer of 1904, neither line stressed which group of passengers it was carrying. In any case, the Scandia Line was hardly a success and reports suggest it became an economic burden for the companies that endorsed it.46 Scandia completed only seven departures from Scandinavia to New York between March and its dissolution in October 1904. On all seven departures, fewer than 350 passengers were on board, even though there was room for more than a thousand.47 DFDS initially did not try to a ract Jewish emigrants, but now it began to actively recruit Jews for its own America service. There were two main markets: among Jewish communities in Russia, and in North America where friends or relatives bought prepaid tickets and sent them to Russia. According to DFDS board meeting minutes, within a month (until 25 April 1904) of marketing its passages specifically to Russian subjects, it had sold eighteen hundred prepaid tickets for the Libau-New York route at the exceptionally low fare of $23, far more than expected. To avoid losing too much revenue, the fare was therea er slightly increased.48 Remigration to Europe was relatively low among Jews, and therefore not a promising market for DFDS in this case.49 Like several other transatlantic companies, DFDS operated two different steamers: the regular, and the faster, more advanced twin-screw. These terms played an important part in marketing strategies. Advertisements in America showed that the fare from Libau to New York via Copenhagen was $27 on the former type of vessel and $36 on the la er. Judging by these advertisements, the company highlighted the price on the regular steamers to a ract the a ention of potential ticket buyers.50 Reports from Jewish passengers on the Norge in June 1904 suggest that DFDS, or more likely migrant brokers like Knie, Falk & Company, also conducted advertising campaigns among Jewish communities in Russia.51 Unlike passenger lists from the company’s agents in Scandinavia that state the hometown (or village), the lists from the agent in Libau only give Russia as the passenger’s last permanent address. In addition to the, at times, scarce data from the contemporary records at Ellis Island, the only known case where it is possible to get a broader view of the scope of the company’s Russian market is in connection with the Norge disaster in June 1904. Of the 242 (almost exclusively Jewish) Russian subjects on that ship, the place of origin for 65 has been identified. They hailed from towns in the provinces of Chernigov, Courland, Ekaterinoslav, Grodno, Kovno, Mogilev, Minsk, Pskov, Poltava, Suwalki, Vilna, Vitebsk, Volhynia, and Warsaw, which are sca ered over a vast area.52 Most locations, however, were close to a train line to Libau.

Russian-Jewish Transmigration and Scandinavian Shipping Companies • 141

Fewer migrants originated from Warsaw and surrounding provinces closer to Germany, and from southern Russia. The diverse places of origin may also suggest that many tickets were bought or recommended by relatives in America. According to the Norge’s passenger list, more than half of the 242 mostly Jewish passages were prepaid.53 Ever since DFDS had taken over the American line from Thingvalla in 1898, it had experienced problems filling its regular steamers. The company’s agent in Gothenburg in Sweden even omi ed the regular steamers in its advertisements, presumably because they could not match the ever-improving steamers of his main British counterparts.54 It was mainly due to the introduction of the three twin-screw sister ships in 1902 and 1903 that the number of passengers on the Danish line increased significantly. With the new flow of migrants from Russia, the company also had a golden opportunity to fill its three regular steamers with more passengers than normal. It seems unlikely that many Jews deep inside the Pale of Se lement, or in the United States for that ma er, would have recognized the distinction between a steamer having one or two propellers, but the difference in price ($7 or today about $348) per adult passenger was considerable. The postcard that Vigdor Gurevitz sent to his wife in Russia in June 1904 showed a picture of the larger twin-screw Hellig Olav. This may have been because he wanted to reassure his wife that he was going on a big ship, and not the small Norge, but it could also have been because he did not know the difference between the two (postcards of the Norge were also available). Further research needs to clarify the impact of differing ticket prices from Libau to New York via Britain, Copenhagen, or Germany, especially during the rate war. The alternative via Copenhagen had the advantage for the migrant of only a short walking distance between feeder vessel and America vessel, while in Britain the passengers had to take the train from Hull to Liverpool, which involved (limited) additional costs. Despite the significant difference in price between DFDS’s regular and twin-screw steamers, most Jewish passengers embarked on the company’s twin-screw liners during the rate war, even though not all departures with regular liners were full.55 A possible explanation is that DFDS usually only had one departure from Libau to Copenhagen every week. Logistically it was not possible to send everyone by regular steamers. From a business point of view, the company did not want all Jewish passengers to choose a regular liner because it made more profit by issuing twin-screw tickets. It is possible to reconstruct the flow and pa ern of the Jewish migration on DFDS’s American liners during the Atlantic rate war. All westbound passenger lists are available at the Provincial Archives of

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Zealand in Copenhagen.56 A study of the passenger lists reveal that from April to December of 1904 a total of forty-seven hundred Russian subjects (almost all Jews) traveled from Copenhagen to New York. The lists are sorted in accordance with the port of embarkation, in addition to Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian contracts. The passengers from Libau are grouped together, but are sorted under Danish contracts. The first Jewish passengers (a total of seven) embarked on the regular liner Hekla in mid April 1904; on subsequent departures the figures gradually increased to 213 in early June (again the Hekla) and the highest number of 331 on the twin-screw Oscar II in mid November. Figure 6.1 shows that no Jewish emigrants traveled on DFDS liners to New York in March 1904. This was also the case throughout 1903. As soon as the conference agreements were fully reinstated by February 1905, the business of transporting Jewish emigrants directly to New York stopped completely, with only three Russian subjects traveling in February and March 1905.57 Furthermore, figure 6.2 shows that the share of Jewish passengers on the company’s twin-screw steamers was roughly the same from June through November 1904, irrespective of the total number of passengers. Apart from June and November when there were three twin-screw departures, there were two twin-screw departures in July, two in August, two in September, and two in October. This suggests that each feeder voyage from Libau carried roughly the same number of Jewish passengers for the twin-screw departures. Figure 6.1. Total Number of Passengers on DFDS, Copenhagen–New York, March 1904 to March 1905. Reg Jewish

Twin Jewish

Reg Scand

Twin Scand

4000 3500 3000 2500 2000 1500 1000 500

Ju ly ,1 90 A 4 ug us t ,1 Se 90 pt 4 em be r, 19 04 O ct ob er ,1 N 90 ov 4 em be r, 19 D ec 04 em be r, 19 04 Ja nu ar y, 19 Fe 05 br ua ry ,1 90 5 M ar ch ,1 90 5

M ar ch ,1 90 4 A pr il, 19 04

M ay ,1 90 4 Ju ne ,1 90 4

0

Source: Provincial Archives of Zealand, Copenhagen, Københavns Politi, 3. Politiinspektorat, Skibsekspeditioner vedr. direkte udvandring 1869–1931.

Russian-Jewish Transmigration and Scandinavian Shipping Companies • 143

Figure 6.2. Passengers per Departure on DFDS, Copenhagen–New York, March 1904 to March 1905. Regular Jewish

Twin Jewish

Regular Scand

Twin Scand

1600 1400 1200 1000 800 600 400 200

M ar ch ,1 90 4 A pr il, 19 04 M ay ,1 90 4 Ju ne ,1 90 4 Ju ly ,1 90 A 4 ug us t , Se 19 pt 04 em be r, 19 O 04 ct ob er , N 19 ov 04 em be r, 19 D ec 04 em be r, 19 Ja 04 nu ar y, 19 Fe 05 br ua ry ,1 90 5 M ar ch ,1 90 5

0

Reg = Regular steamer. Twin = Twin-screw steamer.

Source: Provincial Archives of Zealand, Copenhagen, Københavns Politi, 3, Politiinspektorat, Skibsekspeditioner vedr. direkte udvandring, 1869–1931.

Regarding the composition of passengers on the regular liners, late July 1904 constituted a significant turning point. The share of Jewish passengers on average was around 30 percent on regular liners in June; it rose to 60 percent in August and more than 90 percent in November. No regular departures occurred in October and December 1904. This must be understood in relation to the a ermath of the Norge disaster. When the Norge, a regular liner, sank in June 1904, the bad publicity caused specific problems for the use of the two remaining regular liners. There was much talk in newspapers about the Norge’s single-bo om keel and how it had increased the extent of the disaster. Another issue in several Scandinavian newspapers was that the Norge had carried lifeboats for only one-third of the total number of passengers and crew on board.58 American newspapers and the American Yiddish press—in contrast to Russian and Russian-Jewish newspapers—covered the Norge tragedy extensively.59 This probably explains why the business with regular liners increasingly depended on Russian-Jewish transmigrants, because Scandinavians were not necessarily a racted by cheaper fares. Figure 6.1 clearly shows that hardly any Scandinavians

144 • Per Kristian Sebak

bought tickets on DFDS’s regular liners between September 1904 and March 1905. While the five departures with regular steamers between April and 5 July when news of the Norge disaster broke had an average of 20 percent complement of Russian-Jewish passengers, the same figure was 62 percent on the subsequent five departures. On the twinscrew steamers the same share was 18 and 29 percent. As a result of the Norge accident, the two remaining regular steamers completed their last voyages to New York with passengers in August 1904 and March 1905, respectively. The share of Jewish passengers also increased on the twin-screw liners in November and December 1904 because traditionally during these two months few Scandinavians traveled. Because the Russian-Jewish emigration continued, although at a slower pace than during the summer months, DFDS had the opportunity of filling its twin-screw liners with more passengers than usual for that time of year. There may be several reasons for this, but one stands out: Most Scandinavians knew about the harsh conditions in the North Atlantic during the winter. It is unlikely that all Jews from the Pale of Se lement would have had the same kind of knowledge until they had experienced it themselves.

Conclusion The main objective of this essay was to provide a be er understanding of why so few Russian-Jewish transmigrants traveled via Scandinavia, even though ports in Denmark and Sweden were close. A further question explored how the flow of specific migrant groups, in this case Russian Jews, was subject to structural changes within and among the shipping companies that transported migrants, and how the transportation of migrants worked. Only few Russian Jews traveled via Scandinavia to North America before 1904 because Scandinavian steamship lines were minor players in the transatlantic passenger business and concentrated on the Scandinavian passenger market. DFDS, the only Scandinavian transatlantic passenger line in the early 1900s, was commi ed to agreements with foreign companies that limited its business activities. During the Atlantic rate war of 1904–1905, as the essay has shown, DFDS struggled to make the transition from a Scandinavian niche player to include Russian Jews. Apart from several practical issues, DFDS had to balance the short-term advantages of business opportunities to carry Russian Jews, and the more long-term consequences of possibly losing its niche in the Scandinavian emigration market: namely, as the only company that carried exclusively Scandinavian pas-

Russian-Jewish Transmigration and Scandinavian Shipping Companies • 145

sengers. Finally, the essay has shown that carrying Russian Jews became exceptionally useful for DFDS in the a ermath of the Norge tragedy in June 1904. Scandinavians had become increasingly particular as to their choice of emigrant ship, causing problems for DFDS to fill its old regular liners. This became even more apparent following the loss of the Norge. Arguably, DFDS could not have continued using its remaining regular liners as emigrant ships without tapping the Russian-Jewish passenger market.

Notes 1. This chapter deals with Russian emigration primarily from the Russian port of Libau on DFDS liners in 1904. Judging by the passengers’ names, places of origin, and other sources, there is li le doubt that the overwhelming part of this migrant flow was Jewish. Moreover, Jakob Brandt, the managing director of DFDS, claimed in 1903, “They are Jews, all those emigrants who come from Libau” (DFDS Archive, Copenhagen, Bestyrelses Forhandlingsprotokol (board of directors’ meeting protocol), vol. 4, 381). For the sake of simplicity, the word “Jews” will therefore largely be used in this chapter when referring to Russian Jews. Finns were also Russian subjects, and will be referred to as Finns. 2. Gartner, Jewish Immigrant; Jill Pellew, “The Home Office and the Aliens Act, 1905,” The Historical Journal 32, no. 2 (1989): 369–85; J.A. Garrard, The English and Immigration—A Comparative Study of the Jewish Influx 1880–1910 (Oxford, 1971). 3. Scandinavia refers to Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. DFDS called its American line the Scandinavian-American line when the Thingvalla line was incorporated into its business in 1898. Although the line is mostly known as the Scandinavian-American line outside Scandinavia, for the sake of simplicity DFDS is used in this essay when referring both to the American line and to other branches of the company. 4. In 1906, two Russian lines began to serve the route from Libau to New York: the Russian-American line and the Russian volunteer fleet. 5. This does not include seventeen Finnish passengers who also counted as Russian subjects. Sebak, Titanic’s Predecessor, 315. 6. The most important exception concerns Torsten Feys, A Business Approach to Transatlantic Migration: The Introduction of Steam-Shipping on the NorthAtlantic and its Impact on the European Exodus, 1840–1914 (Ph.D. diss., European University Institute, Florence, 2008). 7. Departementet for Sociale Saker [Department for Social Affairs], Utvandringsstatistikk [Emigrant Statistic] (Oslo, 1921), 103. 8. Francis E. Hyde, Cunard and the North Atlantic 1840–1973 (London, 1975), 27–90.

146 • Per Kristian Sebak

9. Anders M. Møller, Henrik Dethlefsen and Hans Chr. Johansen, Dansk Søfarts Historie, 1870–1920, vol. 5 (Copenhagen, 1998), 217–8. 10. Helge Nordvik, “The Shipping Industries of the Scandinavian Countries, 1850–1914,” in Changes and Adaptation in Maritime History—The North Atlantic Fleets in the Nineteenth Century, ed. L.R. Fischer and G.E. Panting (St. John’s, NL, 1985), 117–48, here 131. 11. Magnus Andersen, 70 års tilbakeblikk på miĴ virke på sjø og i land (Oslo, 1932), 196–255. 12. Keeling, “Transportation Revolution,” 49–50. 13. Bonsor, North Atlantic Seaway. 14. S. Thorsøe, ed., Skandinavien-Amerika Linien, DFDS’ passager- og fragtfart på Amerika (Allerød, Denmark, 2001), 48–51. 15. Hyde, Cunard and the North Atlantic 1840–1973, 90–119, 138. 16. Thorsøe, Skandinavien-Amerika Linien, 48–55. 17. Keeling, “Transportation Revolution,” 39–74; and Keeling, “Capacity.” 18. Departementet for Sociale Saker, 103. 19. Provincial Archives of Zealand, Copenhagen, Københavns Politi, 3. Politiinspektorat, Skibsekspeditioner vedr. direkte udvandring 1869–1931. 20. Thorsøe, Skandinavien-Amerika Linien, 61–72; Danish Business Archives (Århus, Denmark), Skandinavien-Amerika Linien, 1904 S/S Norges forlis, 28 Juni 1904. 21. Evans, “The Port Jews of Libau,” 197–214. 22. Christian R. Jansen, “DFDS og den russiske emigrationslovgivning 1908– 1910,” Meddelelser fra Erhvervsarkivet 24 (1973), 115–29. 23. Arthur G. Credland and Michael Thompson, The Wilson Line of Hull 1831– 1981 (Beverly, UK, 1994), 12–13. 24. Thorsøe, Skandinavien-Amerika Linien, 127. 25. Ibid., 91–98; Murken, Linienreederei-Verbande, 264–81. 26. Ro erdam Municipality Archives, Holland-America Line, 318.04, 580 “Scandinavian Service February 1904.” 27. Sebak, Titanic’s Predecessor, 14. 28. DFDS Archive, Copenhagen, Bestyrelses Forhandlingsprotokol, vol. 5, 54. 29. Ibid., 103–105; DFDS Archive, Copenhagen, DFDS Aarsbertening og Regnskap [annual report and accounts], 1904. 30. Harald Runblom and Hans Norman, From Sweden to America, A History of the Migration (Minneapolis, MN, 1976), 118. 31. DFDS Archive, Copenhagen, Bestyrelses Forhandlingsprotokol, vol. 5, 31–32, 54. 32. Sixty-first Congress, 3rd Session, United States Senate, Reports of the Immigration Commission (1907–1910), Statistical Review of Immigration, 1820– 1910: Distribution of Immigrants 1850–1900 (Washington, DC, 1911), 41. 33. Thorsøe, Skandinavien-Amerika Linien, 97. 34. Provincial Archives of Zealand, Copenhagen, Københavns Politi, 3. Politiinspektorat, Skibsekspeditioner vedr. direkte udvandring 1869–1931. 35. Danish Business Archives (Århus, Denmark), Skandinavien-Amerika Linien, 1904 S/S Norges forlis, 28 Juni 1904. 36. Quoted a er Evans, “Port Jews of Libau,” 205.

Russian-Jewish Transmigration and Scandinavian Shipping Companies • 147

37. Sixty-first Congress, 3rd Session, United States Senate, Reports of the Immigration Commission (1907–1910), Emigration Conditions in Europe (Washington, DC, 1911), 92. 38. Quoted a er: Sebak, Titanic’s Predecessor, 35. 39. Ibid., 25–42. 40. Provincial Archives of Zealand, Copenhagen, Københavns Politi, 3. Politiinspektorat, Lægejournal fra udvandrerskibene. 41. Sogningen (Norway), 27 August 1904. 42. For a detailed treatment of the Norge disaster, see Sebak, Titanic’s Predecessor. 43. Nordisk Tidende (New York), 17 March 1904; and Skandinaven (Chicago), 15 April 1904. 44. Grete Brochmann and Knut Kjeldstadli, A History of Immigration: The Case of Norway 900–2000 (Oslo, 2008). 45. Thorsøe, Skandinavien-Amerika Linien, 96. 46. Ro erdam Municipality Archives, Holland-America Line, 318.04, 157/ “Kriegskosten Cunard, 1905.” 47. Ro erdam Municipality Archives, Holland-America Line, 318.04, Transatlantic Passenger Movement, 1904. 48. DFDS Archive, Copenhagen, Bestyrelses Forhandlingsprotokol, vol. 5, 54. 49. Mark Wyman, Round-Trip to America, The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880– 1930 (Ithaca, NY, 1993), 11. 50. Danish Business Archives (Århus, Denmark), Skandinavien-Amerika Linien, 1904 S/S Norges forlis, 28 Juni 1904. 51. Sebak, Titanic’s Predecessor, 16. 52. Ibid., 296. 53. Danish Business Archives (Århus, Denmark), Skandinavien-Amerika Linien, 1904 S/S Norges forlis, 28 Juni 1904. 54. Göteborgs-Posten (Gothenburg, Sweden), 11 June 1904. 55. Provincial Archives of Zealand, Copenhagen, Københavns Politi, 3. Politiinspektorat, Skibsekspeditioner vedr. direkte udvandring 1869–1931. 56. Ibid. 57. In December 1904, HAPAG reinstated the former agreement with DFDS that it would confine its business to Scandinavian and Finland (Thorsøe, Skandinavien-Amerika Linien, 97). 58. See, for example, Social-Demokraten (Copenhagen), July–September 1904. 59. See, for example, Forward (New York), 5–7 July 1904.

@7 THE BOYS AND GIRLS NOT FROM BRAZIL From Russia to Rio and Back Again Via Southampton and Hamburg, 1878–1880 Tony Kushner

On 13 December 1879 the Southampton Times’s “Shipping Intelligence” reported the arrival of the Royal Mail West India and Brazil Steam Packet Company’s Minho. The ship had called at Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, St. Vincent, Lisbon, and Vigo, bringing the mail from all these ports. It also brought with it £6,650 in specie, all gold, a “large cargo of general merchandise” and “a full complement of passengers.”1 For a busy and fast expanding port in commercial Britain, there was nothing particularly unusual in the Minho’s disembarkation at Southampton.2 Yet alongside this dockside intelligence, the Southampton Times reported elsewhere an emergency meeting of the town’s Board of Guardians. The mayor of Southampton chaired this meeting prompted by the arrival of the “poor Russian refugees” who had been on board the Minho, and were now stranded in Southampton, and for whom “something must be done.”3 In the weeks that followed, the nomenclature a ached to these arrivals would change. If initially and rather patronizingly they were “poor creatures,”4 or “strangers in a strange land” who deserved protection from the unscrupulous,5 descriptions of them became increasingly hostile: rather than helping them, emphasis was now placed on how best and speediest to remove their unwanted presence from the locality. Furthermore, what had been initially a ma er of local curiosity and charity would develop into a national and international cause for concern, with some fearing it would become, at a time of increasing diplomatic tension across Europe, a ma er of major embarrassment involving the governments of Britain, Russia, and Germany. That ninetyone individuals, for the most part from just fi een families, could lead to so much consternation reflects much wider global anxieties at work in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The story of the “refugees” from the Minho on the one hand shows the complex nature of migration pa erns and their global nature at that time. On the other hand, it

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reveals the ambivalence at local and national levels to such movements, especially to that of transmigrants. At the start it is important to outline briefly how these people ended up in Southampton. They were part of a migratory movement that confused many of the contemporaries confronting them and subsequently has only a meager and relatively unsophisticated historiography—indeed, the wider memory work associated with these Russians is limited and confused. Thus, the file on their arrival and stay in Southampton in the local archives is misleadingly (though enticingly) labeled Brazilian refugees.6 All were born in the Samara province in southern Russia where they worked the land, essentially in wheat production.7 They were descendants of a small colony of the so-called Volga Germans, part of the first wave of German emigrants recruited by Catherine the Great in the 1760s in her a empt to help develop and modernize the Russian Empire.8 As with many minority groups, the reasons behind their migratory movement in the last quarter of the nineteenth century are complicated and interrelated. One of their major historians, James Long, provides a lachrymose narrative of their situation in the late Czarist Empire, presenting the “Volga Germans” as “victims of forces beyond their control: natural elements, which made earning a living unpredictable and precarious; tsarist policies, which originally protected them, then neglected them, later discriminated against them, and ultimately alienated them; and virulent political nationalism, which made them pawns in the nationalist European rivalries, leading to their persecution and exploitation as scapegoats.” In contrast to their image as clannish, Long argues somewhat defensively, “In fact, the Volga Germans were loyal, productive Russian subjects who became deeply a ached to their new homes and chosen motherland.”9 As will become apparent, none of the problems that Long highlights were imaginary nor does he invent the local sense of belonging developed by the Volga Germans. Yet to place so much emphasis on their collective victimhood not only denies them a greater element of human agency in the decisions they made, but it also makes it harder to understand the complexities (and sometimes apparent contradictions) of their se lement and movement pa erns in the second half of the nineteenth century.10 Moreover, the identities of the Volga Germans were multilayered, fluid, and dynamic, enabling local patriotism to combine with ethnic loyalty and, as the pa erns of migration became ever more diverse, to link what had become a world-wide diasporic network.11 The decline of the grain trade—a result of increasing foreign competition and falling yields—led many younger Volga Germans, struggling

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financially and overly dependent on wheat, to consider emigration from the 1860s onwards. In the 1870s, another factor came into play: the threat of military service in the Russian army was looming. In 1874, the “Russian government abrogated the Volga Germans’ century-old exemption from military service.”12 Rather than being aimed specifically at this minority, it was part of a wider campaign of Russification in which some groups, especially the Jews, were deemed too alien and so were hounded with the goal of securing their emigration, whereas others, including the Volga Germans, were encouraged to integrate further.13 The la er were largely perceived as desirable in their economic utility and potential to become good Russians (although less so toward the end of the nineteenth century and beyond), but were discouraged from expressing too much ethnic particularity.14 With the growing mobilization of reservists, from the mid 1870s some four thousand Volga Germans went to Brazil to try their luck.15 They were encouraged to do so during what has been described “as the critical years in Brazil’s colonization program.”16 As a result of a report from the Brazilian minister of agriculture, commerce, and public works, it was noted, “Argentina and the United States were more successful than Brazil in a racting immigrant[s].”17 To remedy this problem, which was seen as crucial in developing the Brazilian economy, efforts were made to remove the barriers in the way of potential immigrants such as poor transportation, legal impediments, “the creation of colonies far from markets on sterile, unprepared land” and the “failure to make Brazil known in the countries from which the emigration which we need proceeds.” One group among others that was particularly singled out as desirable immigrants were the Volga Germans; a scheme was implemented to “seat 20,000 of these people on the plains of Parana.”18 The fact that less than 20 percent of that total actually came to the province of Parana at a time when many other Volga Germans went elsewhere suggests that it was not a particularly a ractive option and that those who went were ill-informed of what awaited them. The Volga Germans on the Minho seem to have been stimulated by a mixture of economic uncertainty at home coupled with a naivety in believing tales from an agent who, in their own words, “induced [us] to leave a good home, and to go to a be er one … persuad[ing] us that a Fortune was to be made in Brazil.” This account was wri en at a point when these Volga Germans were trying to defend their desire to return home, and thus there was a need to show themselves to be victims of those who were exploiting their goodwill. Nevertheless, they were not willing to represent themselves as mere tools of others: “We made our

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mind up and started on our emigration tour on the 23rd of May, 1878, for Hamburg.”19 The lure of be er prospects in the Americas went alongside a religious discourse that the Volga Germans a ached to their journey—both leaving and returning to Russia. When the party, all Protestants (with the exception of one Catholic family), le Southampton they explained to their hosts in a le er of gratitude, “We shall now return to our happy and dear, beloved fatherland and home, the good one we once le to go to a be er one; but we soon found out that we made a mistake when we arrived in that Promised Land.”20 In similar vein, when they eventually returned home, they praised the two men, George Lungley and Samuel Messerli, who had accompanied them on their epic journey: “These Gentlemen brought Us to our own Dear Fatherland, like two good Shepherds, who bring their sheep from the Fields to their Home, and look a er them with great care that none should be lost.” Beyond Lungley and Messerli, they also praised the “People of Southampton and all England who have done ‘Us’ so much good and helped ‘Us’ to the End. God our Lord will repay them both in body and soul therea er.”21 As the British minister in Rio put it, their short sojourn in the Brazilian interior was a disaster.22 The large majority of the four thousand migrants who came to Parana in the 1870s were soon determined to leave, encouraged further by local hostility toward them. Those on board the Minho had spent eighteen months in Ponta Grossa in the province of Parana, roughly 150 miles into the interior of Brazil.23 The Volga Germans in Ponta Grossa—2,440 out of the 3,809 who se led in the province—were described in 1878 by the provincial president of Parana, Rodrigo Otavio, as “extremely ignorant, fearful, lazy, envious, and, in spite of being extremely religious, lacking in a sense of true charity.”24 He went on to dismiss them as knowing “only the culture of wheat; but having to plant corn and beans, they sowed the seeds and a erwards went over the ground with primitive plows, brought from Russia, which were drawn by three pairs of oxen. Confronted with the unsuccessful production they excused themselves and blamed the land. They harvested oranges by cu ing down the trees.”25 It is more than possible that this devastating critique was designed to ensure that it was the immigrants and not the Brazilian authorities who were to blame for the so-called dismal failure of the Volga Germans, especially as there was recent anxiety about the way in which “our errors in relation to the emigrants [had been] exaggerated, and hateful calumnies raised against us.”26 Wherever blame should be apportioned (and the comparative success of other groups who se led in Parana at this time, especially the Poles and Ukrainians, suggests that Otavio’s criticisms,

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while harsh, were not unfounded), this colonization venture, which was “entered into on a comparatively large scale and with high hopes,” very soon “failed most miserably” in Brazil. It led many of the Volga Germans either to seek a return to Russia or to move on to Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay where the land was slightly be er suited to their expertise in wheat production.27 Those on the Minho had found that Ponta Grossa was not as promised and “we made our mind up to return to Russia … as we could not get on at all in Brazil.”28 They were some of the last to leave for Brazil and also the last to a empt to return to Russia. But those receiving them in Southampton feared, in the words of a senior politician in the town, that “this batch was only one of many hundreds that would be brought to this country from the Brazils if some means were not taken to prevent it.”29 In fact, only a few were le behind by December 1879. Indeed, it was, indirectly, the antipathy toward the earlier return of these Russian Germans from 1878 onwards across Europe that led those in the Minho to be stranded in the port of Southampton. Their journey home reveals the full complexity and multilayered nature of that term, and exposes the importance of the local in determining the movements of people and the growing fears associated with those in flux.30 Initially, the Russian government refused to allow those on the Minho the right to return. On 17 December 1879, the Russian ambassador in London, M. Bartholomei, informed the foreign secretary, the Marquis of Salisbury, that, because “The Emigrants [have] decisively qui ed the Russian subjection, the Imperial Government regrets not being able to authorize their admission in the confines of the Empire.” He added that this statement “ought to put an end to the useless and unjustifiable expectations of these Brazilian colonists.”31 While this official response appears harsh, the exasperation of the Russian authorities was not simply the result of prejudice against this minority group: because it was not seen as desirable for the Volga Germans to leave, it was discouraged by making the granting of departure and the freedom to take capital out of Russia a one-way process—they had to pledge not to return. Furthermore, some of those who had been allowed to return had done so at a financial and administrative cost to the czarist regime. Bartholomei in his first response to Salisbury on this issue stressed that those on board the Minho had le Russia on a voluntary but also a conditional basis: “[I]n abandoning the Russian subjection they could not re-claim the protection of the Government, nor re-enter Russia.” There was no room for negotiation.32 Nine days later, Bartholomei confirmed the Russian position: because the emigrants had definitively departed the empire, they could not be allowed to return.33

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Why then, over the next few weeks, was this decision slowly reversed? It seems that the Minho refugees became very minor pawns in a diplomatic game at a time of Anglo-Russian tension, reflecting the late days of the Beaconsfield agenda in responding to the so-called eastern question. Eventually, pressure from the foreign office, and perhaps of equal if not greater importance, a promise by the British government to pay the expenses of the returnees, led to a promise to permit those on the Minho to return home.34 In particular, the local government board was sympathetic to the pressure being placed on the Southampton Board of Guardians to support these destitute foreigners in the town. The local authorities in Southampton decided that it would be best if they paid the costs of returning those from the Minho to Russia, with additional funds so that they could reestablish themselves back home, as an incentive to the Russian authorities to reconsider the case.35 The hope of those in Southampton was that this expense would be reimbursed in due course by central government: in the medium term, it would still be cheaper to pay their fare than to look a er them in Southampton.36 Much energy was thus spent diplomatically in both London and St. Petersburg by the foreign office in persuading the Russian authorities to take back these particular Volga Germans. Those on the Minho were doubly lucky that George Lungley of the Southampton Board of Guardians accompanied them home. Lungley, not unusually for those associated with the port, had strong connections to the commercial world of mass migration, having run a company for close to thirty years in Southampton for those emigrating to Australia.37 It was his insider’s knowledge that allowed the relatively smooth return of the Minho refugees. Even so, as he noted in his notes on the journey, “I must say that in the thousands of emigrants that I have assisted to embark, I never found so difficult a task as was undertaken with these people.”38 When those on the Minho were first interviewed in Southampton through an interpreter, they claimed that they had been refused permission to land at Hamburg or at Antwerp and had thus obtained tickets from Rio to Britain.39 This tallies with intelligence gained by Lungley from the British ambassador in St. Petersburg, Lord Dufferin. Dufferin informed Lungley that in 1878 eight hundred Russian Germans returning from Brazil were encamped in Antwerp and “a er great trouble … were conveyed to Russia at a cost of about £3,000.” When another ship carrying a further two hundred such individuals arrived at Antwerp, they were refused permission to land “but were transhipped outside the Harbour and sent on by sea to Russia.” The same story was repeated at Bremen. Dufferin was sure that the Royal Mail Company was aware of this earlier problem and knew that “when the people landed

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at Southampton that the Minho would not be allowed to enter the Harbour of Antwerp.”40 At Hamburg itself, Lungley heard that “Some time previously about 200 [Russian Germans from Brazil] had been received there and a er great expense, the people at the [emigration] Depot accompanied them to Russia.”41 It is not clear what was meant by this emigration depot in Hamburg because it predates the formal facilities in the port. In itself, this unrecorded depot reveals how there is still a great deal to be learned about emigration and transmigrancy pa erns and procedures, even in places that have commemorated their past role in this neglected area of history.42 The party from the Minho was to encounter difficulties at and around Hamburg, but through good fortune, persistence, and not a li le anti-German prejudice on behalf of Lungley, their stay there was relatively brief. Initially, the local authorities in Hamburg were helpful, but their assistance, it soon became apparent, was dependent on Lungley allowing his charges to pass through the emigration depot. He knew that this would lead to considerable delay and cost. As he later noted, “[K]nowing as I did that some of them had just passed out of Hospital at Southampton and on some slight pretense might have detained them for some days at great expense. … It was quite clear that arrangements had been made for them to stay in the Depot, [the authorities in Hamburg] not thinking for one moment that the people would pass through.”43 At Hamburg, Lungley thus hurried his charges onto a night train east. One last a empt was made by the local police to stop the party, but Lungley used his foreign office wri en assurances that the Russian authorities were willing to let the migrants return, and so they were allowed to proceed. The party, however, only got as far as Reinbek on the border between Hamburg and Prussia, where the train was forced to stop. Lungley was astonished by what then happened: “[T]he carriage in which the people were located was detached from the train and a scene took place which I can scarcely describe. The people’s baggage was thrown out of the baggage waggon without any enquiry … and the train proceeded without us.” Lungley and his interpreter were bungled out of their carriages, sustaining minor injuries. In a wonderful evocation of English understatement, he later reported to the Southampton authorities, “As may be imagined, I felt for a few minutes in rather an uncomfortable position.” Prussian officials arrived and Lungley was most affronted to be taken for a Russian. Lungley asked his interrogator whom he was, and in hearing the response, “a German,” stated, if “you are a fair specimen, I think very li le of you.” U erly exasperated, Lungley still refused to let his charges return to Hamburg for the de-

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pot. When asked, however, what he intended doing with the people, he responded “I will make you a present of them. … I will give you them for nothing.”44 Faced with such stubbornness, not to mention xenophobia, the party was allowed to proceed, backed by fresh commitments from the British government about meeting the costs of the journey back east. Already delayed by fog and ice, the party continued toward Russia, with only a short delay of three hours at the border as the identity of the ninetyone Russian Germans was confirmed. All in all, the journey back home from Southampton via London, Hamburg, and Prussia had taken close to two weeks. Lungley’s detailed account of the journey gives li le indication of the state of mind of his charges, and focuses instead on the discomfort he faced, as he traveled in a separate carriage. On one level, the case of the Minho is relatively unusual in that it provides us with two accounts of the journey from the migrants’ perspective. On another level, the more detailed narrative of their return journey, penned by Lungley, is more typical of the historical record in rendering them silent. All we know is that some a empt was made to help reintegrate them by the local authorities in Samara with blankets given to them to cope with winter and a donation of £50 given by the empress of Russia “to assist them again establishing a home”—a reflection of their relatively privileged status, through British government intervention, compared to many of the returning Volga Germans.45 What, then, can be gleaned from this story if one moves from the precise, if somewhat bizarre and unique story, to the general? First, it urges us to think locally, even when confronted with an overall narrative that is clearly global in its wider context. For Southampton, during the month the Volga Germans were in the town, it was the major story of the moment, especially as irritation grew with the delay in removing the arrivals and the cost of looking a er them subsequently increased. While indulging in local self-congratulation over the considerate treatment that had been offered to the Volga Germans,46 the reality was that they were transformed from refugees to immigrants and then to foreigners in local discourse as the weeks passed.47 Indeed, the local, liberal newspaper, when hearing of their imminent removal, noted, even “with every feeling of consideration for the poor people themselves,” that “the inhabitants of Southampton will no doubt regard their departure as a ‘good riddance’.”48 In addition, local officials were concerned that the example of those from the Minho might become a “dangerous precedent”—one that could lead the town to be “crushed with a burden of foreign pauperism”—a double danger to the Victorian charitable mind.49

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Such anxieties were to develop further; with a health panic in the early 1890s linked to the cholera and typhus epidemics in Hamburg and New York, it is no surprise that the ad hoc solution to dealing with those on board the Minho—they were housed in the ancient and disused jail—was replaced by a formal Emigrants Home, opened in 1893 and supported by the local authorities, the major shipping companies, and the American consul in the town.50 From the 1890s onwards, Southampton became increasingly important as a place of transmigrancy, which, by the time of World War I, was beginning to rival Liverpool in this respect. It was, of course, the war that was to largely destroy this lucrative trade. When the major shipping companies in 1922 opened Atlantic Park Hostel outside Southampton, one of the largest facilities in the world for transmigrants, it was to fail commercially and became a drain on them as they had to look a er those le stranded by the new immigration quota laws of the American government.51 But returning to the late 1870s and early 1880s, the case of the Minho showed how local authorities in Britain were unprepared for such an influx. When a deputation from the Southampton Board of Guardians asked the local government board for advice, the best example that could be offered as a precedent by the British government were refugees who had arrived during the time of Lord Palmerston.52 In the decades that followed the arrival of the Minho emigrants, a local and national structure was put in place to deal with the aliens, whether floating or permanent, especially the alleged medical threat that they posed. Even so, the national and anti-alien Standard newspaper was overstating its case in 1906 when it claimed that in Southampton “the town was heartily in sympathy with [the Aliens Act of 1905], for it had suffered badly at the hands of penniless foreigners, who frequently dri to the local workhouses or infirmary, and become a permanent charge on the rates.”53 There was also a positive impact of transmigrancy on the town’s economy and thus an overall ambivalence toward such movements. Given its importance in transmigrancy—in two months in 1904, for example, eight thousand eastern Europeans le the port—it is surprising that there is no official memory or memorialization of this trade in Southampton.54 The story of the Brazilian Volga Germans has been totally forgo en even though their temporary home, a fine medieval building, is now the Archaeology Museum and the flagship of the heritage world in Southampton. Many people were involved in looking a er those from the Minho who undoubtedly received kindness and genuine interest in their background as well as a growing resentment from the less tolerant. In the local workhouse, sadly, one young girl

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from the ship died of consumption; happily, though, a baby was also safely delivered there.55 Local responses clearly ma ered to those on the Minho and they made the difference between homeless destitution and their ultimate return to Russia. As Lungley concluded a er his return to Southampton, without his efforts they “might have been [still] at Hamburg at the present time.”56 More blatantly, local responses at the ports of Antwerp and Hamburg were part of a world to come— the concentration and medical inspection and rejection of immigrants, transmigrants, and refugees.57 If this was a growing phenomenon in the Western world, it was one that had strong local variations and initiatives, initiatives that would o en catch on elsewhere adding to their cumulative impact. Second, the story of the Minho appears, at first sight, unusual in that the refugees on board were a empting to return home. Return migration has been neglected until recently as an integral part of the huge process of people traveling west and north in huge numbers from the nineteenth century onwards through the advent of cheap and speedy travel.58 The case of the Volga Germans has been especially subject to amnesia in the historiography of modern migration movements. And even the major historian of the Volga Germans who le for the Americas expresses surprise that as well as moving onto Argentina some of those who went to Brazil “even returned to Russia.”59 The Minho provides a case study that illustrates the dangers of generalizing why people leave and shows the multilayered meanings and complexity of constructing a place called “home.” As has been noted, James Long in his study of the Volga Germans in the second half of the nineteenth century reminds us that in spite of their sometimes precarious and unpredictable situation, the Volga Germans developed a close a achment to the localities in which their (o en distant) ancestors had se led within the Russian Empire.60 Economic, ecological, and political tensions, and increasing intolerance at home, did not make the decision to leave an easy one. For many, including those on the Minho, disappointment in the place of emigration, the new but failed promised land, only intensified the sense of loss. The mean streets of New York and other huge cities of America did not confront the immigrant with the immediate problems of survival, as did the interior of Brazil. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of Europeans would return home or try their luck elsewhere in countries like Britain. The process of transmigrancy added further to the complexity of belonging and not belonging. It was big business, but also through its massive scale, an indication of the essential mercurial nature of migration—the harder one tries to pin it down, the more elusive and untrappable it becomes. Transmigrants

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act as a reminder, if one was ever needed, that migration is rarely if ever a simple ma er of leaving one place and going to another.61 “Home,” for perhaps the majority, was established, either temporarily or permanently, as somewhere in between. Thus, a er just a few weeks in Southampton, those from the Minho felt confident to “give three cheers for the Great Queen and the Royal Family of the good land of England.”62 England, and especially the port of Southampton, if experienced only briefly and at a traumatic moment, was a place never to be forgo en. Fluidity is the key to understanding immigrants’ experience from the nineteenth century onwards: their routes were o en intricate and lengthy and their roots were laid down in many different places. It should also be noted that some of the Volga Germans did establish themselves in Brazil and became part of the rich cultural mosaic of that nation. As one observer wrote as late as the 1960s, “In the south of Brazil the journey of a few hours may easily carry one through areas representative of nineteenth-century European peasant communities of German, Polish, Italian, and Volga German types.”63 Third and finally, some thoughts are required on the labeling of those on board the Minho: Were they refugees as first described by those receiving them in Southampton, or simply immigrants or unwanted foreigners, as they soon became known? Their motives for leaving were clearly partly economic as well as, to a far lesser extent, millenarian. But they were also liminal and marginal (in spite of their valued economic contribution) as a distinct ethnic group in the Russian Empire and one that was vulnerable, especially with their fear of military conscription. The plight of the Volga Germans, because they were seen as ultimately assimilable, was not so desperate as the more extreme case of the unwanted Jews of the late Czarist Empire. Nevertheless, their future status and well-being was unclear as a result of what has been labeled the “ambiguities of Russification.”64 James Long sees the treatment of the Volga Germans as deteriorating rapidly in the last sixty years of czarist rule so that “Increasingly, they became victims of circumstances and forces beyond their control.”65 The initial refusal by the Russian authorities to accept the right of the Volga Germans to return home gives some indication of their uncertain position. As with so many groups, including the best known and most wri en about, the eastern European Jews, the division between refugees and immigrants, or, as contemporary polemics would have it, between those deserving of asylum and those who were undesirable aliens, was in the eye of the beholder, or more basically, in the eye of the local immigration official. The variability with which those on board the Minho were treated, even locally within a five-week period, illustrates

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the tensions of the time. It is thus not difficult to perceive what might lie ahead given the treatment of a group that might have been viewed positively as they were, in contemporary thinking, of Saxon stock and Protestant faith. The Minho was presented locally as ultimately a story with a happy ending, with the immigrants returned safely home. In many respects— at least in the short term—it was, and while luck was on their side, those from the Minho played their part. Their le ers expressing their gratitude to all concerned in enabling their return home (bar, of course, the Brazilians), but also their ambitions for a prosperous future back in the Russian Empire, “our own Dear Fatherland,” were set before those in high authority—not just in Southampton but also in London and St. Petersburg.66 These Volga Germans helped compose a portrait of their remarkable journey in which they clearly saw themselves as deserving of support. In their eyes, they had been cruelly misled into emigration by the Brazilian authorities and agents. But, to finish, a closer reading provides other, less-reassuring narratives relating to the wider treatment of the Volga Germans back from Brazil—narratives that would emphasize their isolation and rejection in the ports of Europe and the new world, where they were neither perceived as refugees nor understood for their own specific historic background. Indeed, as they returned to the continent, Lord Dufferin remarked with some irritation with the problems they had caused but confusion as to who they actually were: “Might not the Canadian Emigration Agent be glad to send these Menonites [sic, my emphasis] to Canada?”67 Like so many transmigrants of the time and beyond, they were “people who do not fit” and thus were treated simply as “ma er out of place.”68

Notes 1. Southampton Times, 13 December 1879. 2. A. Temple Pa erson, A History of Southampton, 3 vols. (Southampton, UK, 1975), vol. 3 (Setbacks and Recoveries, 1868–1914), 64–70. 3. Southampton Times, 13 December 1879. 4. Southampton Times, 20 December 1879. 5. Description by a Mr. Dixon, a local ship designer, who first befriended them, reported in Southampton Times, 13 December 1879. 6. Southampton Record Office (SRO), SC/AG 14/15. My thanks are due to my colleague, Dr. James Jordan, for originally coming across this entry in the catalogue of the record office. 7. Details of their origins given to the local government board by the mayor of Southampton, reported in Southampton Times, 20 December 1879.

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8. See Karl Stumpp, The German-Russians: Two Centuries of Pioneering (Bonn, Germany, 1971); and Karl Stumpp, The Emigration from Germany to Russia in the Years 1763 to 1862 (Lincoln, NE, 1978) for general accounts of this movement and, from a more specific and critical historical perspective, Fred Koch, The Volga Germans in Russia and the Americas, from 1763 to the Present (University Park, PA, 1977), 19–38; James Long, From Privileged to Dispossessed: The Volga Germans, 1860–1917 (Lincoln, NE, 1988), 87–102 on the early se lement and economics of Samara province. 9. Long, From Privileged to Dispossessed, xii. 10. This complexity partly explains, although it does not of course justify, some of the exasperation that these migrants confronted from local and national bureaucrats, politicians, media, and public. 11. Thus in the preface to Stumpp, The Emigration from Germany, Kunzig argues that the author’s work were of “especial significance even today, not only for the history of the local and ancestral origins of the emigrant people but also for the former colonists who are sca ered today in many parts of the world.” 12. Long, From Privileged to Dispossessed, 33. 13. On Russification and ethnic/national/religious groupings within the empire, see Geoffrey Hosking, Russia and the Russians: A History from Rus to the Russian Federation (London, 2001), 333–44; Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire (Harlow, UK, 2001), 247–82; Theodore Weeks, “Managing Empire: Tsarist Nationalities Policy,” in The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 2, Imperial Russia, 1689–1917, ed. D. Lieven (Cambridge, UK, 2006), 27–44. 14. Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire. The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, MA, 2003). 15. This was the figure given by F. C. Ford, British Minister in Rio to the Marquis of Salisbury, as quoted in an editorial of Southampton Times, 7 February 1880. There are no definitive figures for the total number of Volga Germans who went to Brazil. Koch, The Volga Germans, 226 rejects as “somewhat incomprehensible” the estimate of two hundred fi y thousand for 1940. The figure was probably one-fi h of that total. 16. T. Lynn Smith, Brazil: People and Institutions (Baton Rouge, LA, 1963), 407. 17. Ibid., 407–8. 18. Ibid., 407–8, 410. 19. A copy of the le er is in National Archives, Kew, UK (NA), FO 181/595. It is partly quoted by the mayor of Southampton to the local government board, as quoted in Southampton Times, 20 December 1879. 20. Southampton Times, 7 February 1880. 21. Le er signed by the Volga Germans, 9 February 1880 in SRO, SC/AG 14/15. 22. Quoted in Southampton Times, 7 February 1880. 23. See the statement of the mayor of Southampton to John Lambert of the local government board, 13 December 1879, in NA, FO 181/595. 24. Quoted in Smith, Brazil, 410. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 408.

The Boys and Girls Not from Brazil • 161

27. Quoted in Smith, Brazil, 408; see also: Koch, The Volga Germans, 228. 28. Le er from the emigrants to the people of Southampton, 5 January 1880, in NA FO 181/595. 29. Mr. Cooksey, councilor, quoted in Southampton Times, 13 December 1879. 30. For more generally on these issues, see Kushner and Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide. 31. M. Bartholomei to the foreign secretary, 20 December 1879, in SRO SC/AG 14/15. 32. Bartholomei to Salisbury, 17 December 1879, in NA FO 181/595. 33. Bartholomei to Salisbury, 26 December 1879, in NA FO 181/595. 34. The diplomatic correspondence can be followed in NA FO 181/595. 35. See the le er of John Lambert of the local government board to the foreign office, 7 January 1880, in NA FO 181/595. 36. See the correspondence in SRO SC/AG 14/15 for January 1880. See also correspondence in NA FO 181/595 and 634 and FO 183/15. 37. See Southampton Times, 20 December 1879, for an account of Lungley’s career and approval of his suitability to help the Southampton Board of Guardians with these problem people. 38. Mr. Lungley, “Report on Conveying German Russian Immigrants from Southampton to Wir Ballen in Russia,” in SRO SC/AG 14/15 (herea er “Lungley Report”). The report is partially reproduced in Southampton Times, 6 March 1880. 39. Southampton Times, 13 December 1879. 40. “Lungley Report.” 41. Ibid. 42. There is no mention, for example, of such early facilities in the Hamburg Emigration Museum, situated itself in Hamburg Auswandererhallen, BallinStadt. 43. “Lungley Report.” 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Editorial in Southampton Times, 7 February 1880. 47. Editorial in Southampton Times, 31 January 1880, which refers to them simply as “Russian immigrants.” A le er from a “Ratepayer” published in the same paper, 10 January 1880, labeled them as “foreigners” who should be got rid of, claiming that they were wealthier than they had made out. 48. Editorial in Southampton Times, 31 January 1880. 49. Editorial in Southampton Times, 17 January 1880. 50. For the use of the old jail, see Southampton Times, 13 December 1879, and a le er in the same newspaper, 27 December 1879, from a man of German origin, F.E. Fahrig, who tried (unsuccessfully) to visit them there. For Atlantic Hotel and concerns about immigrant health at local, national, and global levels, see Tony Kushner, Anglo-Jewry since 1066: Place, Locality and Memory (Manchester, UK, 2009), 209–37. 51. Ibid. 52. Report of the delegation in Southampton Times, 13 December 1879. On discussions between the mayor of Southampton and the foreign office concerning Polish refugees stranded in the port during 1851, see NA HO 45/3720.

162 • Tony Kushner

53. The Standard, 2 January 1906. 54. Kushner, Anglo-Jewry since 1066, 209–37. 55. On the young woman’s death of consumption in the local workhouse, see Southampton Times, 20 December 1879. On the birth, also in the workhouse, see Southampton Times, 13 December 1879. 56. Lungley at the Southampton Board of Guardians, reported in Southampton Times, 6 March 1880. 57. See Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide, 49–72. 58. On the Jewish case, in which return migration was as much as five times smaller than for other groups, but still between 5 and 10 percent of those departing from eastern Europe, see Sarna, “The Myth of ‘No Return’”; Gur Alroey, “Bureaucracy, Agents, and Swindlers: Hardships Faced by Russian Jewish Emigrants in the Early Twentieth Century,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 19 (2003): 214–31. 59. Koch, The Volga Germans, 222. 60. Long, From Privileged to Dispossessed, xi–xv. 61. For the most detailed analysis of this phenomenon, see Evans, Aliens En Route. 62. Collective le er of 9 February 1880 in SRO SC/AG 14/15. 63. Smith, Brazil, 12–13. 64. Andreas Kappeler, “The Ambiguities of Russification,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5 (2) 2004), 291–7. 65. Long, From Privileged to Dispossessed, 246. 66. Le er of 9 February 1880 in SRO SC/AG 14/15. 67. Telegram from Dufferin to Salisbury, 28 January 1880, in NA FO 181/601. 68. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, 1996 [1966]), 41; and utilizing this concept with regard to refugees, Malkki, “National Geographic,” 34.

@ Contributors Tobias Brinkmann (Ph.D., Technical University Berlin, 2000) is the Malvin and Lea Bank Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania. Recent publications include Sundays at Sinai: A Jewish Congregation in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Migration und Transnationalität: Perspektiven deutsch-jüdischer Geschichte (Paderborn, Germany: Schöningh, 2012); and “Why Paul Nathan A acked Albert Ballin: The Transatlantic Mass Migration and the Privatization of Prussia’s Eastern Border Inspection, 1886–1914,” Central European History 43 (2010): 47–83. Carl Henrik Carlsson (Ph.D., Uppsala University, 2004) is researcher at The Hugo Valentin Centre at Uppsala University, and coordinator and member of the board of the National Research Network, “The Jews in Sweden—The History of a Minority.” Recent publications include Medborgarskap och diskriminering. Östjudar och andra invandrare i Sverige 1860–1920 (Ph.D. diss., Uppsala University, 2004); and Judisk invandring från Aaron Isaac till idag,” in Judarna i Sverige—en minoritets historia. Fyra föreläsningar, ed. H. Müssener (Uppsala: Hugo ValentinCentrum, 2011), 17–54. Drew Keeling (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2005) has taught part-time in the History Department of the University of Zurich since 2006. His doctoral dissertation, “The Business of Transatlantic Migration between Europe and the USA, 1900–1914,” won the 2005 Alexander Gerschenkron Prize of the Economic History Association. Recent publications include The Business of Transatlantic Migration between Europe and the United States 1900–1914 (Zurich: Chronos, 2012); and “Transport Capacity Management and Transatlantic Migration, 1900–1914.” Research in Economic History 25 (2008): 225–83. Tony Kushner (Ph.D., University of Sheffield, 1986) is professor of history and director of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/NonJewish relations at the University of Southampton. He is the author of several monographs, most recently Remembering Refugees: Then and Now (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); Anglo-Jewry since

164 • Contributors

1066: Place, Locality and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); and The BaĴle of Britishness: Migrant Journeys, 1685 to the Present (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). Nicole Kvale Eilers (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2009) is currently a historian in the World War II division of the Defense POW/ Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) in Washington, DC. Prior to joining DPMO, she was the German Historical Institute Thyssen-Heideking Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cologne in 2009–2010. Recent publications include “Bremerhaven,” in Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur, 411–16 (Stu gart: J.B. Metzler, 2011). Barbara Lüthi (Ph.D., University of Basel, 2005) is professor of North American history at the University of Cologne. Recent publications include “Invading Bodies”: Medizin und Immigration in den USA (1880– 1920) (Frankfurt: Campus, 2009); and “Perspectives on Security in 20th Century Europe and Abroad,” Journal of Contemporary European History 20 (2011): 207–214. Per Kristian Sebak (Ph.D., University of Bergen, 2012) is an associate professor at the Bergen Maritime Museum in Norway. He is revising his dissertation, “A Transatlantic Migratory Bypass, Scandinavian Shipping Companies and Transmigration through Scandinavia, 1898–1929,” for publication. Recent publications include Titanic’s Predecessor—The S/S Norge Disaster of 1904 (Laksevaag, Norway: Seaward Publishing, 2004). Klaus Weber (Ph.D., University of Hamburg, 2001) is professor of European economic and social history at Europa-University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder. Recent publications include Religion und Philanthropie in den europäischen ZivilgesellschaĞen. Entwicklungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Paderborn, Germany: Schöningh, 2009), ed. jointly with R. Liedtke; and Deutsche Kaufleute im Atlantikhandel 1680–1830: Unternehmen und Familien in Hamburg, Cadiz und Bordeaux (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2004).

@ Selected Bibliography Alroey, Gur. Bread to Eat & Clothes to Wear: Le ers from Jewish Migrants in the Early Twentieth Century. Detroit, MI, 2011. ———. “Bureaucracy, Agents, and Swindlers: Hardships Faced by Russian Jewish Emigrants in the Early Twentieth Century.” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 19 (2003): 214–31. Anthes, Louis. Lawyers and Immigrants, 1870–1940: A Cultural History. Levittown, NY, 2003. Armgort, Arno. Bremen, Bremerhaven, New York 1683–1960: Geschichte der Auswanderung über die Bremischen Häfen. Bremen, Germany, 1991. Aschheim, Steven E. Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German–Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923. Madison, WI, 1982. Barbance, Marthe. Histoire de la Compagnie Générale Transatlantique. Paris, 1955. Bentwich, Norman. They Found Refuge. An Account of British Jewry’s Work for Victims of Nazi Persecution. London, 1956. Brinkmann, Tobias. “From Hinterberlin to Berlin: Jewish Migrants from Eastern Europe in Berlin before and a er 1918.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 7 (2008): 339–55. ———. “‘Travelling with Ballin’: The Impact of American Immigration Policies on Jewish Transmigration within Central Europe, 1880–1914.” International Review of Social History 53 (2008): 459–84. ———. “Why Paul Nathan A acked Albert Ballin: The Transatlantic Mass Migration and the Privatization of Prussia’s Eastern Border Inspection, 1886– 1914.” Central European History 43 (2010): 47–83. Broeze, Frank. “Albert Ballin, The Hamburg-Bremen Rivalry and the Dynamics of the Conference System.” International Journal of Maritime History 3, no. 1 (1991): 1–32. Brownstone, David M., and Irene M. Franck. Island of Hope, Island of Tears. New York, 1979. Brubaker, Rogers. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge, MA, 1992. Cannato, Vincent J. American Passage: The History of Ellis Island. New York, 2010. Carlsson, Carl Henrik. Medborgarskap och Diskriminering: Östjudar och andra Invandrare i Sverige 1860–1920. Uppsala, Sweden, 2004. Caron, Vicki. Uneasy Asylum. France and the Refugee Crisis, 1933–1945. Stanford, CA, 1999. Credland, Arthur G., and Michael Thompson. The Wilson Line of Hull 1831–1981. Beverly, UK, 1994. Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. New York, 2002.

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Hoerder, Dirk. Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium. Durham, NC, 2002. Holmes, Colin. John Bull’s Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871–1971. London, 1988. Howe, Irving. The World of Our Fathers. New York, 1976. Hyde, Francis E. Cunard and the North Atlantic 1840–1973. London, 1975. Iriye, Akira. “The Internationalization of History.” American Historical Review 94, no. 1 (1989): 1–10. Jacobson, Ma hew Frye. Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917. New York, 2000. ———. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, MA, 1998. Just, Michael. Ost- und südosteuropäische Amerikawanderung: 1881–1914. Transitprobleme in Deutschland und Aufnahme in den Vereinigten Staaten. Stu gart, Germany, 1988. Karlsberg, Bernhard. History and Importance of the German Control of Emigrants in Transit. Hamburg, Germany, 1922. Keeling, Drew. “The Business of Transatlantic Migration between Europe and the USA, 1900–1914.” Journal of Economic History 66 (2006): 476–80. ———. “Repeat Migration between Europe and the United States, 1870–1914.” In The Birth of Modern Europe: Culture and Economy, 1400–1800, Essays in Honor of Jan de Vries, edited by Laura Cruz and Joel Mokyr, 157–86. Leiden, Netherlands, 2010. ———. “Transatlantic Shipping Cartels and Migration between Europe and America, 1880–1914.” Essays in Economic and Business History 17 (1999): 195–213. ———. “Transport Capacity Management and Transatlantic Migration, 1900– 1914.” Research in Economic History 25 (2008): 225–83. Klier, John D. Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882. Cambridge, UK, 2011. Kobrin, Rebecca. Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora. Bloomington, IN, 2010. Koch, Fred. The Volga Germans in Russia and the Americas, from 1763 to the Present. University Park, PA, 1977. Kraut, Alan M. Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace.” New York, 1994. Kulischer, Eugene M. Jewish Migrations: Past Experiences and Post-War Prospects. New York, 1943. Kushner, Tony, and Katherine Knox. Anglo-Jewry since 1066: Place, Locality and Memory. Manchester, UK, 2009. ———. Refugees in an Age of Genocide: Global, National and Local Perspectives during the Twentieth Century. London, 1999. Kuznets, Simon. “Immigration of Russian Jews to the United States: Background and Structure.” Perspectives in American History 9 (1975): 35–124. Kvale, Nicole. Emigrant Trains: Migratory Transportation Networks Through Germany and the United States, 1847–1914. Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2009. La Sorte, Michael. La Merica: Images of Italian Greenhorn Experience. Philadelphia, 1985.

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@ Index agents. See migrant brokers Aliens Act. See Britain Alliance Israèlite Universelle, 6, 11 relationship to British Jews, 91 American Jewish Joint Distribution Commi ee, 6 Amsterdam, 91 anti-Jewish violence against Jews in Poland in and a er 1935, 97 against Jews in the Russian Empire, 4–5, 53, 118 during the journey to America, 119 in Germany 1938 (Kristallnacht), 98 Antin, Mashke (Mary), 6–11, 37, 70–72 Antwerp, 17, 35, 70, 73, 85, 91, 94, 130, 134, 153–54, 157. See also Red Star Line Argentina, 1, 3, 12, 17, 150, 152, 157 Atlantic Park Hostel. See Southampton Atlantic rate war (1904–1905), 15, 130–31, 135–37, 139, 141, 144 Australia, 1, 2, 9, 85, 153 Auswandererhallen (Hamburg). See Hamburg-America Line Ballin, Albert, 68 Baltimore, MD, 107, 109, 115, 129 Banister, John, 34 Bentwich, Herbert, 87 Berlin, 8, 10, 12, 13, 17 Bismarck, O o von, 66 Boston, 7–8, 197, 109, 115 Bradford (England), 16 Brazil, 10, 17, 148–59

Bremen, 13, 14, 35, 37, 63, 65, 85, 93, 130 emigrant trains, 63, 72–74, 134 migrants in transit, 77 See also North German Lloyd Bremerhaven, 77 Britain Aliens Act (1905), 11, 33, 38, 91–94, 99, 130, 156 diplomatic contacts with Russian government, 152–53 immigration policy, 11, 32–34, 38–39, 88, 91–100 Jewish immigration, 29, 33, 85–100 Jewish philanthropy, 85–100 migrants in transit, 16, 38–39, 85–86, 117–19, 130, 135, 141, 148–59 See also Cunard Line, Grimsby, Hull, Jewish Board of Guardians (London), Jews’ Temporary Shelter (London), Liverpool, London, Southampton Budapest, 1 Buenos Aires, 148 Canada, 2, 6, 7, 17, 87, 90, 159 migrants in transit, 14–15 Castle Garden (New York), 56 Castle Line. See Union Castle Line Catherine the Great, 149 Chicago, 4, 47 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 9 Christiania (today known as Oslo), 130 Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (CGT), 112, 135

172 • Index

control stations (Prussia), 13, 14, 15, 38, 64, 68–69, 79–80 Copenhagen, 16, 55, 130–31, 134, 136–38, 140–43 migrants in transit, 136–38, 142 Cunard Line, 135–36, 139. See also Liverpool Danish Thingvalla Line, 16, 130, 132–34, 141, 145 Danmark regulation of steamship lines, 136 See also Copenhagen, DFDS DFDS (Det Forenede DampskibsSelskab), 16, 130–45. See also Atlantic rate war (1904–1905), Norge disaster disinfection of migrants, 8, 11, 14, 35, 37–39, 63, 65, 67–70, 79, 89. See also Copenhagen, HamburgAmerica Line, Ruhleben, quarantine, United States East Asiatic Company, 132 Ellis Island, 1, 2, 10, 12, 16, 30, 66, 79–80, 93, 113, 118, 140 inspections and rejections of migrants, 36–37 and reforms of W. Williams, 78, 112 Evans-Gordon, William, 34, 79, 92 Eydtkuhnen (today known as Chernyshevskoye, Russia), 8 Felsenthal, Bernhard, 7 Fishberg, Maurice, 31, 37 Fiume (today known as Rijeka, Croatia), 35, 135 France Vichy regime and Holocaust, 18 Jewish immigration a er 1918, 18, 97 Jewish philanthropy, 97 Genoa (Italy), 35 Germany bacteriology and immigration, 31

eastern Europeans in transit, 13–15, 32, 36–37, 63–80 Jewish immigration, 29 See also Bremen, Hamburg, Hamburg-America Line, North German Lloyd, Prussia Glasgow, 86, 130 Gothenburg (Göteborg), 49–50, 55, 58–59, 141 Grimsby (England), 38, 86, 130 Grodno (Belarus), 140 Gronemann, Sammy, 73 Grosse Île (QE, Canada), 7, 14 Hamburg, 8, 14, 17, 35, 37, 53, 55, 71, 85, 93, 130, 151, 154–55 1892 cholera, 11, 13, 37, 67, 76, 93 Auswandererhallen (emigrant halls) and migrants in transit, 73–76, 154–55 emigrant trains, 73–76, 134 Jewish philanthropy, 89 Hamburg-America Line (HAPAG) 1892 Hamburg cholera, 13, 35, 67, 76, 156 Atlantic rate war (1904–1905), 135, 136, 140 Auswandererhallen (emigrant halls), 73–76 control stations, 13, 14, 38, 63, 68–69 price-fixing cartel, 15, 134 See also Atlantic rate war (1904–1905) Hanover (Germany), 72–73, 83 HAPAG. See Hamburg-America Line Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), 37 Helsingborg (Sweden), 55, 135 HIAS. See Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden, 6 Prussian 1906 expulsions, 13 founding and policy, 12 Holocaust, 4, 18 relationship to British Jews, 91 Hirsch, O o, 96

Index • 173

Holland-America Line, 135. See also Ro erdam Hull (England), 16, 38, 85–86, 130, 134–35, 141. See also Wilson Line International Mercantile Marine Company, 133, 135 Israelitische Allianz (Vienna), 91 Jewish Board of Guardians (London), 87–89, 91–93, 99 Jewish Colonization Association (St. Petersburg), 6, 91 Jews’ Temporary Shelter (London), 86–100 Kalmar (Sweden), 55, 58 Kaiserslautern (Germany), 7 Karlskrona (Sweden), 49 Karlstad (Sweden), 47, 59 Königsberg (today known as Kaliningrad, Russia), 54, 72 kosher food, 38, 76–77, 119, 138 Kovno (today known as Kaunas, Lithuania), 53–54, 140 Kristiansand (Norway), 130, 135, 137 Leeds, 16 Leipzig, 12, 69, 71 Le Havre, 7, 8, 17, 35 Libau (today known as Liepāja, Latvia), 16, 90, 130, 134–42 Lithuania, 4 Liverpool, 16, 17, 35, 38, 85–86, 130, 133, 136, 141, 156. See also Britain, Cunard Line Lisbon, 148 Łódź (Poland), 1 Lomza (Poland), 53 London, 4, 12, 14, 17, 38, 47, 85–100, 130, 135, 155, 159 British government, 152–53 Jewish immigrants, 85–100 migrants in transit, 93 See also Britain, Jewish Board of Guardians, Jews’ Temporary Shelter

Louisville, KY, 8 Lund (Sweden), 58–59 Malmö (Sweden), 55, 137 Manchester (England), 16 Memel (today known as Klaipeda, Lithuania), 54 migrant brokers, 137, 140 Minsk, 140 Moca a, Frederick D., 87–88 Montagu, Samuel, 87, 92, 101 Montefiore, Sir Moses, 101 Montefiore Vereenigung (Ro erdam), 91 Morgan, John Pierpont, 133, 135 Naples (Italy), 35 NDL. See North German Lloyd New York, 4, 7, 12, 51–53, 59, 91, 157 1892 typhus outbreak, 67 direct service from Libau, 140 service from Scandinavia, 130, 133, 135–36, 138, 140–44 See also Ellis Island, United States Norge disaster (1904), 131, 139–41, 143–44 Norrköping (Sweden), 49 North German Lloyd (NDL), 13 1892 Hamburg cholera, 67 Atlantic rate war (1904–1905), 135, 140 Bremen facilities for transit migrants, 77 control stations, 13, 14, 38, 63, 68–69 price-fixing cartel, 15 steerage, 113 See also Atlantic rate war (1904– 1905), Bremen, Bremerhaven Norway emigration, 16, 130–33, 136–37, 139 Norwegian-American Line, 132 Odessa, 12, 35 Osnabrück (Germany), 17 Ostjude (eastern Jew) image, 30, 31 in Britain, 88 in Germany, 31

174 • Index

Ostrowo (today known as Ostrow Wielkopolski, Poland), 9 Pale of Se lement (Russian Empire), 134, 138, 141, 144 Palestine, 1, 18, 87, 97 Paris, 8, 89–90 passport a er 1918, 18 for entering Sweden, 50 for Prussian transit before 1914, 70 Philadelphia, PA, 91, 107, 109, 115, 129 Philippson, Ludwig, 54 pogroms. See anti-Jewish violence Polotzk (today known as Polatsk, Belarus), 7, 8 Ponta Grossa (Brazil), 151 Prague, 17 Prussia, 7, 8, 9, 12 1868–1869 Jewish immigration crisis, 53–54 agreement with HAPAG and NDL, 13, 15, 68–69 emigrant trains, 63, 72, 154 labor migrants from eastern Europe, 32 expulsions of foreigners, 10, 12 Jewish immigration, 29 eastern Europeans in transit, 13–15, 32, 63–80, 154–55 See also Berlin, Germany, Hamburg-America Line, North German Lloyd Pskov (Russia), 140 quarantine in Canada, 7, 14 in Hamburg, 8, 76 requirement for Russian subjects en route to the U.S., 11, 35, 37, 67–68 See also Grosse Île, HamburgAmerica Line, United States Red Star Line, 135 Reed, Alfred, 30, 36

Reinbek (near Hamburg), 154 Riga, 16, 137 Rio de Janeiro, 148 Roberts, Kenneth L., 31 Roosevelt, Theodore, 112 Ross, E.A., 31 Ro erdam, 17, 35, 70, 73, 85, 91, 130, 134. See also Holland-America Line Ruhleben (near Berlin), 8, 10, 11, 14, 37, 69–72, 75, 79 Russian Empire anti-Jewish violence, 4–5, 53, 118 emigration, 4–7, 50–54, 70, 76, 86, 118, 134–35, 149–59 military service, 150 Russian-Japanese War 1904–1905, 94 Rydz-Smigly, Edward, 97 St. Lawrence River, 7, 14 St. Petersburg (Russia), 6, 59, 91, 137, 153, 159 St. Vincent (Caribbean), 148 Salmon, Thomas, 30 Samara (Russia), 149, 155 SARS epidemic, 19 Scandia Line, 135, 140 Scandinavia transmigration from Eastern Europe, 47–61, 130–45 See also Sweden Shtetl, 1, 4, 6, 7, 47 South Africa, 1, 2, 3, 85 Jewish migration from Britain, 90–91 Southampton (England), 10, 17, 85–86, 130, 148–62 Atlantic Park Hostel, 17, 156 migrants in transit, 156 See also Union Castle Line steerage. See travel conditions Ste in (today known as Szczecin, Poland), 135 Stockholm, 49–50, 55, 59 Stoner, George W., 78. See also Ellis Island Sundsvall (Sweden), 58

Index • 175

Suwalki (Poland), 47, 52–54, 60, 140 Sweden 1887 peddling ban, 57–58 census (folkräkning), 52 emigration, 136 Jewish emancipation, 49–50 Jewish immigration, 49–54 migrants in transit, 47–61 Swedish-American Line, 132 statelessness, 18, 152

immigration restrictions before 1914, 27, 30, 31, 36, 66, 77–80 migrant inspections by U.S. officials abroad, 14–15, 138 regulation of steamship lines, 109–10, 112–14 Jewish population, 3 Nativism, 31 U.S. Public Health Service, 30, 36. See also Ellis Island

Thingvalla Line. See Danish Thingvalla Line ticket agents. See migrant brokers Titanic disaster, 131 travel conditions on trains, 71–75 in steerage on steamships, 16, 90, 108–120, 138–39 See also kosher food

Vienna, 1, 5, 12, 17 Vigo (Spain), 148 Vilna (today known as Vilnius), 140 Virchow, Rudolf, 32 Vitebsk (today known as Witebsk, Belarus), 140 Volga Germans, 149–50, 157

Union Castle Line, 90–91. See also Southampton United States, 9, 12 1892 Hamburg cholera, 67 1893 Quarantine Act, 37 immigration bills of 1921 and 1924, 17, 18, 36 immigration from east Asia, 31, 36, 66

Warsaw, 1, 12, 17, 140, 141 Whelpley, James Davenport, 27, 34 Wiegand, Heinrich, 68 Williams, William, 78, 112. See also Ellis Island Wilson, J.G., 30 Wilson Line, 134, 137. See also Hull Windau (today known as Ventspils, Latvia), 137