JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

europe
third quarter of the 19th century (the crucial year may be fixed
at 1870), Jewish *emancipation being henceforth the rule. Jews
now began to play a role of increasing importance in European
cultural, literary, scientific, social, and even political activity.
At the same time, Jewish *assimilation became accelerated,
both in the extreme form of conversion to the dominant faith,
and in the more loyal form of the representation of Judaism
simply as a divergent European religion – that is, *Reform Judaism,
in all its branches and aspects (including *neo-Orthodoxy).
The development of a Hebrew secular literature along
European models (*Haskalah) and of vernacular literature on
Hebrew scholarly themes (Wissenschaft des Judentums) were
other aspects of this same tendency.
There was however one area where this new attitude did
not apply, and the exception was numerically more important,
and in its way more significant, than the rule. In *Russia
(where there was no important Jewish settlement until the
annexation of those areas of the old Polish kingdom which
had the largest Jewish population) these were years not of
progress but (with rare intervals) of reaction, and in 1881 a
wave of massacres (*pogroms) began on a scale and of a type
which recalled the Middle Ages, to be followed by economic
and social restrictions of unprecedented scope (the *“May
Laws”). A wave of emigration (see *migration) followed on a
vast scale. This entirely changed the face of European Jewry
within very few years. It greatly reinforced the Jewish communities
of Western Europe, in particular that of England,
and even changed their character. But far more important
than this was the transatlantic migration. Emigration largely
from Germany in the first three-quarters of the 19th century
had relieved the pressure of population in that country and at
the same time greatly developed the Jewish community in the
*United States of America. Now, within a few years, as a result
of immigration from Eastern Europe, it was to be reinforced
in fantastic proportions. The results were all-important. For
eight centuries after approximately the year 1000, the essential
center of Jewish life and creativity had been in Europe. Outside
the European area there had been only relatively unimportant
offshoots, and this applied in particular to Ashkenazi
Jewry. After the 1880s the United States was to be the second,
and in due course the first, center of Jewish life in the world,
from the point of view of population, and the relative role
of European Jewry correspondingly diminished. From the
early Victorian era the Western European Jewish communi-
558 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6
Population in 1939, before the outbreak of World War II. Jewish figures based on American Jewish Yearbook.