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Abstract
The mass migration of Jews from the Russian Empire to the US is commonly believed to have been caused by two waves of pogroms (1881-1882 and 1903-1906). Historians have recently questioned this view, but little quantitative evidence exists to support or refute it. To examine this view, I construct a data set that links hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants (1900- 1914) and almost 1,500 Jewish hometown-based associations (1861-1920) to their places of origin, and geo-locate hundreds of pogroms. I find no evidence that the Jewish migration was initiated by the first wave of pogroms; instead, subsequent migration continued along a pre-existing spatial trend and originated from districts that did not experience violence. The second wave of pogroms, however, did meaningfully increase the rate of migration from affected districts. I interpret these findings as evidence that although both economic conditions and persecution were underlying motives for migration, neither explain the evolution of the Jewish migration across time and space. Instead, its main patterns were primarily shaped by a gradual process of spatial diffusion of social migration networks across the Pale of Settlement. This conclusion supports the Diffusion Hypothesis as an explanation for the delayed migration from the European Periphery during the Age of Mass Migration.
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1Introduction
Refugees fleeing persecution and violence or economic migrants? This question stands at the core of the recent migration crises in Europe and in US's southern border, but it is hardly a new one. The same question was presented more than a century ago, in regards to the plight of millions of Jews who had been leaving Russia en masse. The Jewish migration has since become the paradigmatic case of overseas migration driven by inter-ethnic violence and state persecution, and yet the historical literature is increasingly skeptical as to the prominence of such non-economic motives in bringing it about. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the role that inter-ethnic violence played in causing the Jewish migration, by using systematic data on the geographic origins of the Jewish migration and on the locations of anti-Jewish pogroms in Late Imperial Russia.
The hypothesis advanced in this paper is that internal conditions in the places of origin-both economic and political-did play a role in...