And yet there is clearly good reason to argue that the Jews were, in some sense, first among nonequals. They were by far the largest community among those that had no claim to a national home in the Russian Empire; by far the most urbanized of all Russian nationalities (49 percent urban in 1897, as compared to 23 percent for Germans and Armenians); and by far the fastest growing of all national or religious groups anywhere in Europe (having grown fivefold over the course of the nineteenth century). Most important, they were affected by Russia’s late-nineteenth-century modernization in ways that were more direct, profound, and fundamental than most other Russian communities, because their very existence as a specialized caste was at stake. The emancipation of the serfs, the demise of the manorial economy, and the expansion of the economic role of the state rendered the role of the traditional Mercurian mediator between the countryside and the town economically irrelevant, legally precarious, and increasingly dangerous. The state took over tax collection, liquor sales, and some parts of foreign trade; the landlord had less land to lease or turned into a favored competitor; the peasant had more produce to sell and turned into a favored competitor (by doing much of the selling himself); the Christian industrialist turned into an even more favored—and more competent—competitor; the train ruined the peddler and the wagon driver; the bank bankrupted the moneylender; and all of these things taken together forced more and more Jews into artisanal work (near the bottom of the Jewish social prestige hierarchy), and more and more Jewish artisans into cottage-industry production or wage labor (in craft shops and increasingly factories). And the more Jews migrated to new urban areas, the more frequent and massive was violence against them.15
The imperial state, which presided over Russia’s industrialization and thus the demise of the traditional Jewish economy as well as the killing and robbing of individual Jews, did its best to prevent the former middlemen from finding new opportunities. Jews were barred from government employment (including most railway jobs), all but fifteen of Russia’s provinces, more than one-half of the Pale’s rural districts, and a variety of occupations and institutions. Their access to education was limited by quotas, and their membership in professional organizations was subject to arbitrary regulation. The ostensible—and, apparently, true—reason for these policies was to protect Christian merchants, students, and professionals from Jewish competition, and Christian peasants from Jewish “exploitation.” The state that had used the Jews to extract revenue from the peasants was trying to protect the peasants it still depended on from the Jews it no longer needed. The more it protected the peasants, the graver the “Jewish problem” became. The imperial government did not instigate Jewish pogroms; it did, however, help bring them about by concentrating the Jewish population in selected places and occupations and by insisting on separation even as it fostered industrial growth. Fin de siècle Hungary and Germany (and later most of Russia’s western neighbors) contributed to the growth of political anti-Semitism by combining vigorous ethnic nationalism with a cautiously liberal stance toward Jewish social and economic mobility; late imperial Russia achieved a comparable result by combining a cautious ethnic nationalism with a vigorous policy of multiplying Jewish disabilities.16
The most dramatic and easily observable Jewish response to this double squeeze was emigration. Between 1897 and 1915, about 1,288,000 Jews left the Russian Empire, most of them (more than 80 percent) to the United States. More than 70 percent of all Jewish immigrants to the United States came from the Russian Empire; almost one-half of all immigrants from the Russian Empire to the United States were Jews (with Poles a distant second with 27 percent, and Finns third with 8.5 percent). The Russian Jews had the highest gross emigration rate (proportion of emigrants to the overall home population) of all immigrants to the United States; during the peak period of 1900–1914, almost 2 percent of all Jewish residents of the Pale of Settlement were leaving every year. The overwhelming majority of them never came back: the Russian Jewish rate of return was the lowest of all immigrant groups in the United States. They left with family members and joined other family members when they arrived. Between 1908 and 1914, according to official statistics, “62% of the Jewish immigrants to the United States had their passage paid by a relative and 94% were on their way to join a relative.” As Andrew Godley put it, “Because the costs of moving and settling were reduced by the existence of the informal networks of kith and kin, chain migrants generally arrived with less in their pockets. The Jews arrived with least because of all the immigrants they could count most on a welcome reception. The density of social relations among the East European Jews subsidized both passage and settlement. Such extensive chain migration allowed even the poorest to leave.”17
Not all—not even most—migrants went abroad. Throughout the Pale of Settlement, Jews were moving from rural areas into small towns, and from small towns to big cities. Between 1897 and 1910, the Jewish urban population grew by almost 1 million, or 38.5 percent (from 2,559,544 to 3,545,418). The number of Jewish communities with more than 5,000 people increased from 130 in 1897 to 180 in 1910, and those over 10,000, from 43 to 76. In 1897, Jews made up 52 percent of the entire urban population of Belorussia-Lithuania (followed by Russians at 18.2 percent), while in the fast-growing New Russian provinces of Kherson and Ekaterinoslav, 85 to 90 percent of all Jews lived in cities. Between 1869 and 1910, the officially registered Jewish population of the imperial capital of St. Petersburg grew from 6,700 to 35,100. The actual number may have been considerably higher.18
But the extraordinary thing about the social and economic transformation of the Russian Jews was not the rate of migration, which was also high in Austria, Hungary, and Germany, or even “proletarianization,” which was also taking place in New York. The extraordinary thing about the social and economic transformation of the Russian Jews was how ordinary it was by Western standards. Pogroms, quotas, and deportations notwithstanding, the Russian Jews were generally as keen on, and as successful at, becoming urban and modern as their German, Hungarian, British, or American counterparts—which is to say, much keener and much more successful at being capitalists, professionals, myth keepers, and revolutionary intellectuals than most people around them.