All events · Empire, Clearance and Removal

Anti-Jewish Pogroms, the May Laws and Emigration from the Russian Empire

1881–1900 · Europe & Northern Eurasia

Displacement Sexual Violence

Displaced

750,000

Emigration is measured from receiving-country arrival records rather than Russian departure records, which did not exist for most emigrants. Somewhere in the region of three quarters of a million Jews left the Russian Empire between 1881 and 1900, chiefly for the United States, with about two million leaving in the whole period to 1914. Separate and better documented is the expulsion of Jews from Moscow beginning in 1891, which removed on the order of twenty to thirty thousand people to the Pale of Settlement. Both figures are reconstructions from immigration statistics, communal aid-society records and police orders.

Share of the population affected

14%

of the Jewish population of the Russian Empire at the 1897 imperial census, 1897

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What happened

After the assassination of Alexander II in March 1881, waves of anti-Jewish riots swept the south-western provinces of the Russian Empire, destroying homes, shops and synagogues. The government's response was restrictive rather than protective: the Temporary Regulations of May 1882, known as the May Laws, prohibited new Jewish settlement outside towns within the Pale of Settlement and curtailed Jewish landholding and trade, and were followed by quotas on secondary and higher education and, from 1891, the expulsion of most Jews from Moscow. The combination of periodic violence and legal disability produced the largest Jewish migration in history: hundreds of thousands left in the 1880s and 1890s, with the total passing two million by 1914. The killing associated with pogroms was limited in this period; the great lethal pogroms came after 1903 at Kishinev and during the revolutionary violence of 1905-06 and the civil war.

Parties

Mobs attacked Jewish communities across the south-western Russian Empire while the imperial government restricted Jewish residence, trade and settlement, driving mass emigration

Disputed

The degree of official instigation of the 1881-84 riots is disputed: older accounts held that the government organised them, while more recent scholarship in the YIVO Encyclopedia and elsewhere emphasises official passivity, local economic conflict and the state's use of the violence to justify restriction rather than its authorship of it.

The denominator

The 1897 census, the empire's only general census, recorded 5,215,805 Jews by religion, about 94 per cent of them in the Pale of Settlement and Congress Poland; the same population was roughly 4 million when the pogroms began in 1881. The emigration figure counts departures to the United States, Britain, Argentina and Palestine over two decades.

The denominator is a mid-period census while the numerator accumulates emigration over twenty years; measured against the roughly 4 million Jews of 1881 the share would be noticeably higher.

Where the baseline comes from

Russian Empire Censusofficial
Pale of Settlementopen-edited

On the death toll

The pogrom wave of 1881-84 killed comparatively few people - deaths were counted in the tens rather than the thousands - and its damage was overwhelmingly to property, livelihoods and personal security. Mass killing in pogroms belongs to the period after 1903. Presenting a death range for 1881-1900 would misrepresent an episode whose principal effect was expulsion and emigration rather than slaughter.

Documented forms of violence

Destruction of PropertySexual ViolenceDenationalization

The YIVO Encyclopedia and the Center for Israel Education document the destruction and looting of Jewish homes, shops and synagogues, rapes committed during the riots, and the legal disabilities of the May Laws and the residence regime that placed Jews outside the ordinary rights of imperial subjects.

Movements mapped

Pale of Settlement -> New York and the United States
Expulsion from Moscow (1891) -> the Pale of Settlement
Odessa -> London's East End

Countries touched, on present-day borders

Ukraine, Russia, Poland, United Kingdom

Sources

This entry rests only on reference, press or open-edited sources. Treat its figures as indicative and follow the links before relying on them.