n Russian Jewry. In the Empire of the Tzars the Jews
were denied the right of residence and the privilege of a school
education, but forced at the same time to serve in the army. In the
United States they at once received full civil equality and free
schooling without any compulsory military service.

It goes without saying that the emigrants who had no difficulty in
obtaining equality of citizenship were nevertheless compelled, during
their first years of residence in the New World, to engage in a severe
struggle for their material existence. Among the emigrants who came to
America in those early years there were many young intellectuals who had
given up their liberal careers in the land of bondage and were now
dreaming of becoming plain agriculturists in the free republic. They
managed to obtain a following among the emigrant masses, and founded, in
the face of extraordinary difficulties, and with the help of charitable
organizations, a number of colonies and farms in various parts of the
United States, in Louisiana, North and South Dakota, New Jersey, and
elsewhere. After a few years of vain struggling against material want
and lack of adaptation to local conditions, a large number of these
colonies were abandoned, and only a few of them have survived until
to-day.

In the course of time the idealistic pioneer spirit which had
animated the Russian intellectuals gave way to a sober realism
which was more in harmony with the conditions of American
life. The bulk of the emigrant masses settled in the cities,
primarily in New York. They worked in factories or at the
trades, the most important of which was the needle trade;
they engaged in business, in peddling, and in farming, and,
lastly, in the liberal professions. Many an immigrant passed
successively through all these economic stages before obtaining
a secure economic position.

The result of all these wanderings and vicissitudes was a
well-established community in the United States of some 200,000 Jews,
who formed the nucleus for the rapidly growing new Jewish center in
America. One of the active participants and leaders in this movement,
who had in his own life experienced all the hardships connected with it,
concludes his account of the emigration to the United States at the end
of the eighties with the following words:

No one who has seen the poor, down-trodden, faint-hearted inhabitant
of the infamous Pale, with the Damocles sword of brutal mob rule