The Wandering Jew: Emigrants, Refugees, and Olim in the Twentieth Century

The article seeks to provide a comparative perspective on Jewish emigration to the United States and to Mandatory Palestine during the period spanning World War I and the civil war in Ukraine through the closing of the United States borders to immigrants in 1924. The study consists of three sections. The first offers a typological explication of the concepts of emigration, aliyah, and refugeehood. The second part utilizes this typological discussion to characterize Jewish emigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The third section considers the attitudes exhibited by absorbing societies towards newcomers. The article furnishes a detailed account of the socio-political forces shaping Jewish emigration patterns and their implications for identity and absorption. In addition to a critical examination of the ideological, economic, and social context of Jewish migration, it discusses the hardships of displacement and absorption and traces the characteristics inherent to Jewish emigration.