Globalizing diaspora: The eastern European Jewish mass migration and the transformation of the Jewish diaspora

Between the 1860s and the early 1920s, more than two million Jews moved from small towns in Eastern Europe to the United States. Smaller groups went to other destinations in the Americas, Western Europe, Palestine, and South Africa. This chapter discusses the background and impact of that mass migration around the world. The global diffusion of Jews from Eastern Europe concentrated in three new Jewish centers: the United States, the Soviet Union, and Israel. The Eastern European Jewish mass migration, however, did not ultimately lead to the formation of a distinct diaspora of Yiddish-speaking Jews, but rather became the driving force behind a dramatic transformation of the Jewish diaspora as a whole. The reasons for this can be explained by several factors: accelerated Jewish assimilation in these centers, the short period of the mass migration, the great diversity of the migrants, and the almost complete destruction of Jewish life and culture in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust.